CHAPTER TWENTY
 
GREAT EXPECTATIONS

BILL CLINTON WAS ensconced in the back seat of a limousine transporting him in unaccustomed luxury through the ice-slicked streets of Little Rock. At his side was Dave Matter, an old friend from his undergraduate days at Georgetown. Matter had been the campaign manager for Clinton’s first tough defeat, when he lost the student council presidency because his classmates had grown bored with his smooth patter and his ingratiating manner with the school establishment. Now, on this January night twelve years later, the two were reunited for Clinton’s inauguration as the youngest governor in the United States since before World War II. As they rode from one event to the next, Clinton turned to Matter and professed surprise at what had become of his life. “Matter,” he said, in his soft, hoarse voice. “Did you ever think it would come to this?” For Matter, who had been invited into the limousine in one of Clinton’s characteristic share-the-moment impulses, as for scores of other friends from various chapters of Clinton’s life who converged on Little Rock for his ascension to the governorship, the answer was … yes, of course. Yes, of course, he would be Governor Clinton or Senator Clinton some day. And yes, of course, that might only be the beginning.

This first inaugural, for the friends of Clinton and Rodham, had the aura of a generational rite. From all sections of the country they made the pilgrimage to gray, freezing Little Rock. They were there to witness the coming of age of one of their own, the first in their class to reach such prominence on the political stage. Matter and Tommy Caplan represented the Georgetown crowd. Betsey Wright, who had worked with Clinton and Rodham during the McGovern campaign in Texas, came out from Washington. Fred Kammer and Alston Johnson, who first encountered Clinton when they were pro-civil rights senators at Boys Nation, arrived from Louisiana. From the Yale Law School group came Carolyn Ellis from Mississippi and Steven Cohen and Greg Craig from Washington. Carolyn Yeldell, Clinton’s high school friend, returned from Indiana to sing Verdi and Mozart arias in the Capitol rotunda. She was Carolyn Staley now, married to an art teacher, and ready to move home, believing that “this was a good time for the family to be aligned with the Clinton administration.”

Along with these generational cohorts, the inaugural congregation included a colorful mix of elders. Don Tyson strutted down to the state capital to host a pre-inaugural bash at the Camelot Hotel. From Washington came Sara Ehrman, Rodham’s landlady during her stay in Washington for the Watergate inquiry, who five years earlier had warned that moving to provincial Arkansas would be a grave mistake. Arriving by private jet from Norton, Virginia, were Carl McAfee and Charlie Daniels, the gung-ho lawyer and patriotic plumber who had encountered Clinton during his journey to Moscow eight years earlier when they were seeking the release of American POWs from North Vietnam. McAfee kept teasing Rodham about not changing her name. Daniels, a University of Tennessee football fanatic who owned an orange limousine that he would ride to Volunteer football games, showed up at the Diamonds and Denim ball in his bright orange tuxedo, an outfit that delighted Clinton’s mother.

All of them traveled to Little Rock with the notion that the rise of Clinton and Rodham transcended that time and place. At a party the night before the swearing in, Clinton strolled up to Steven Cohen and asked, “Well, what do you think?” Cohen was an idealist, going back to his days in the antiwar movement and the McCarthy campaign, but his idealism dissolved into disillusionment when people he believed in let him down or when he thought the country was losing its way. He came to Little Rock in a dispirited mood, worn down by the controversies surrounding his job in the human rights office at the State Department and by the increasing disarray of the Carter administration. But none of that weary cynicism seemed evident in Clinton’s Arkansas. “I’ll tell you what I think,” Cohen said to Clinton. “I feel two emotions in this room that I hadn’t experienced in a long time—pride and hope.”

The next day, Cohen and Greg Craig, now an attorney at the Williams & Connally law firm in Washington, stood side by side listening to Clinton’s inaugural address, and were transfixed by the rhythmic cadence with which he laid out the credo of their generation. “For as long as I can remember,” Clinton said, “I have believed passionately in the cause of equal opportunity, and I will do what I can to advance it. For as long as I can remember, I have deplored the arbitrary and abusive exercise of power by those in authority, and I will do what I can to prevent it…. For as long as I can remember, I have loved the land, air and water of Arkansas, and I will do what I can to protect them. For as long as I can remember, I have wished to ease the burdens of life for those who, through no fault of their own, are old or weak or needy, and I will try to help them.” Cohen then heard his own words come back to him. “Last evening, after our Gala, a friend of mine from Washington who travels this country and speaks to many groups in many places, said that he felt in that crowd two emotions which are not found in other places today. Pride and hope. Pride and hope. With those two qualities, we can go a long way….” At that moment, it seemed to Cohen and Craig that their old Yale Law friend deserved his status as a generational leader.

Craig returned to Washington “absolutely euphoric.” Later he would say that he could not think of a political event that had excited him more than Clinton’s first inaugural.

THE young governor arrived with an ambitious agenda. An in-house study showed that he had made fifty-three specific promises before he took office. Two promises were unmet on the first day. He was so eager to get going that he promised that he would have a budget summary book on the desk of every legislator for the opening day of the General Assembly and that he would have all his bills drafted by that day as well. Both were late. When the budget summary did appear, it was so thick that some legislators joked they would strain their backs lifting it. Clinton assumed, because of his overwhelming numerical victory in the election, that he had a mandate to transform the state. Creating new departments in energy and economic development, revamping the rural health care system, reorganizing school districts, reordering the education system—he wanted to do it all in two years. His state of the state address was so detailed that it contained a section on the length of time landlords could hold security deposits from renters. Old-line legislators looked at the legislative package with glazed eyes.

Clinton and his top assistants bubbled over with ideas that they had been collecting from progressive policy thinkers around the nation, from preschool programs to solar energy projects. It was what one adviser called “a pent-up idealistic agenda.” But the young governor was also conscious of the need to be perceived as a cautious spender. Most of the programs were crammed into the first budget as demonstration projects,with little money behind them. With his new fascination for polls, Clinton asked Dick Morris to survey Arkansas voters on the dozens of ideas that he had put into the budget, and then rank them in popularity and construct an overall theme. Morris conducted the poll, but could not find a theme. “He was left with a program that was thoroughly admirable but indescribable,” Morris recalled. “There was a bit of everything. Like a kid in a candy store, he wanted to do it all.”

Along with his diffuse experimentation, Clinton chose one larger issue to define himself: roads. He used as his impetus a legislative report that had declared the state highway system a disaster in need of $3.3 billion worth of improvements. Better roads were essential to the economic future of the state, Clinton said. In private, he also expressed the belief that a major roads program would show that this Yale Law grad and Oxonian understood rural Arkansas. Before presenting his highway proposal, Clinton directed Morris to conduct polls on the acceptability of various taxes to fund it. His revenue specialists told him that the quickest way to raise large sums was to increase the annual car license fees. His program people told him that the largest burden of the road improvements should be placed on eighteen-wheel trucks, which were causing most of the road damage. Morris’s polling showed that 53 percent of the people would support an increase in the car license fees to build better roads, while 37 percent opposed such a tax. Clinton thought the poll meant a majority would support him if he raised the fees.

The administration drafted a proposal that placed most of the tax burden on heavy trucks but also raised car license fees, basing the rate of increase on the value of each car. The plan immediately encountered intense opposition from two powerful lobbies, the trucking industry and the poultry industry, a major user of trucks, both already upset at Clinton for backing away from a campaign promise to increase the weight allowed for trucks driving in Arkansas from 73,000 pounds to 80,000 pounds, the weight allowed in several neighboring states. Several trucking firms threatened to leave Arkansas. The poultry industry, which had its operatives as far inside the legislative process as possible—its paid lobbyists were elected members of the legislature—stymied the administration bill in committee. Determined to find middle ground, Clinton signed off on a compromise that angered all sides. The major tax burden was shifted from trucks to cars and pickups, but the trucking and poultry industries remained upset that they were hit with higher taxes and hammered at Clinton for the rest of the term trying to get him to push for repeal. Meanwhile, the car license increase was altered so that it was based on weight rather than value. Owners of new, smaller, lighter, and more expensive cars would be asked to pay less to renew their licenses than poorer citizens who drove around in heavy old clunkers. This was not a politically wise concept in a rural state full of jalopies and old pickups.

ON his first official trip in office, Clinton took a chartered flight to northwest Arkansas for a series of appearances in Fort Smith, the conservative military town, where most voters regarded him skeptically. When he arrived at the terminal, he turned to his travel aide, Randy White, and asked, “What are we doing? What’s the story?” White, who had secured a job in the governor’s office after serving as student manager for the Arkansas basketball team coached by Clinton’s friend, Eddie Sutton, pulled out a schedule. “I know the schedule,” Clinton snapped. “Where’s the briefing book?” White was at a loss. There was no briefing book. Clinton’s face reddened and he slammed his fist on the counter. “God damn it!” he fumed. “When we go somewhere, you’ve got to know who we’re meeting with and what’s going on and what grants the county is getting!”

As Clinton “pounded like crazy” on the counter, White thought to himself, “Oh, shit!” This was the first test of his job and he had flubbed it. Clinton wanted to know everything and White knew next to nothing. Terrified, he found a telephone and placed a call back to his boss, Rudy Moore, Jr., the aide in charge of day-to-day administration of the governor’s office. Calm down, Moore told him: things would get straightened out, and in any case the mess-up was not the travel aide’s responsibility. White feared that Clinton would remain mad at him all day, but as soon as they left the air terminal, the anger vanished, replaced by a compulsive urge to mingle and tell stories. “Whenever we’d pass something, he’d have a story,” White recalled later. “We’d drive through a precinct and he’d say, ’Oh, I lost this box 48 to 175, and then go on to explain why he’d lost it. Then we’d pass by a store and he’d say, ‘Oh, stop here’ for Miss so-and-so, ‘I’ve known her forever.’ He’d go in and drink a Coke and stay. It went all day like this. Good Lord, we were off schedule. Way off.” Finally, late in the day, White called back to Little Rock again. Now Moore was mad. Several questions had come up back at the office that needed Clinton’s consideration, Moore said. In the future, they should never go that long without checking in. It was White’s first trip, and he “caught it from both ends.”

Randy White’s predicament on that initial trip to Fort Smith came to symbolize much of the frustration and confusion in the governor’s office during Clinton’s first term. Catching it from both ends was all too common for a staff whose boss was both extremely demanding and exceedingly lax, and who could seem, at the same time, obsessively in touch and yet remote. To the outside world, it often appeared that the governor’s aides during that first term were getting him in trouble and letting him down. But the staffs mistakes in large measure reflected Clinton’s loose, free-ranging management style, his conflicted personality, and his urge to be all things to all people.

A few months into his tenure, Clinton gained a reputation that seemed contrary to his political nature. Legislators, lobbyists, and citizens began voicing complaints that they were having difficulty getting through to him. How could this be? How could this obsessively gregarious politician suddenly become isolated? Most attributed it to an overprotective staff. At Clinton’s urging, visitors from other parts of the state showed up at the governor’s office only to be turned away by aides. Powerful state senators fumed at a letter in which Rudy Moore said that they should see him if they wanted to deal with Clinton. Labor leader J. Bill Becker groused that Clinton was “insulated by staff people.” But most of these problems resulted from a classic Clinton paradox: his eagerness to please people often ended up angering them; wanting to be open, he ended up appearing closed.

“Clinton was so friendly, people would come up to him on the road and say, ‘I’ve got a problem and I need to talk to you,’ and Clinton would say, ‘Well, if you’ll be in Little Rock next week, come by my office’—and they would,” Moore recalled. “Then he wouldn’t be in or he’d have someone else scheduled or he’d tell us to handle it. So expectations would be raised and people would be disappointed.” The worse the problem became, the harder it was for Clinton to appreciate that he was the principal cause of it. His solution was to beef up his scheduling staff and complain more about his overcrowded schedule. Not long after Randy White was moved to scheduling, he received a note from Clinton saying that too many people were getting through the system to see him.

“I have no time to be governor!” Clinton lamented. White responded with a two-page memo that began: “Grab this week’s schedule and let’s review it.” Every person on the schedule, White noted, was someone with whom Clinton had agreed to meet. “Anyone who could get through and whine to him, he’d let them through,” White said later. “And then he’d blame it on me.”

One reason many people could not reach Clinton at the governor’s office was that he was not there when he was expected to be. His tendency to straggle and talk to anyone who wanted to talk to him had reached the point by 1979 that his staff operated by what they called Clinton time. They would often lie to him about when he was due somewhere, giving him an earlier time than the actual one, hoping that might keep him on schedule, but by the end of a day he could still be an hour or two behind. Some appointments were more important not to be late for than others, but Clinton was egalitarian in that regard: he could be as late for a meeting with high-rolling corporate executives as for one with poor farmers. Once, when the state’s powerful poultry barons were upset about a tax proposal, Clinton’s staff arranged a summit meeting in the governor’s office. The hostility that they brought with them to Little Rock only increased once they reached Room 250 and were asked to wait in the lobby until Clinton returned. He finally arrived two hours late.

After the tense meeting, Clinton raged at his scheduling staff, blaming them for the disaster. The session with the poultry executives, he grumbled, was not on his schedule. “You back off!” Rudy Moore told him. “You’re wrong. You were late!”

The habit was never broken, but eventually Clinton’s aides learned to accept it with gallows humor. Randy White noticed an advertisement in the newspaper that seemed especially aimed at Clinton. “Will you commit larceny today?” the ad asked. “You could be stealing from someone important to you. If you steal time, someone else suffers.” Readers were urged to tear out the ad and “hand it to a thief.” White gave it to Clinton, who laughed. On another occasion the governor’s receptionist sent a note to Rudy Moore warning him that an uninvited and potentially dangerous visitor was in the building. “Security downstairs holding guy in their office who said he was sent here to kill the Gov.,” her note read. Moore took the note and sent it on to White in scheduling with this deadpan notation: “RW—see if you can work him in.”

HE was thirty-three, and his nicknames had regressed from the juvenile to the infantile. Where during his Fayetteville days he was sometimes referred to as “Wonder Boy” or “the Boy,” he now occasionally answered to “Baby”—as in “Baby’s getting too big for his britches,” or “Maybe Baby’s growing up!”—a monicker given to him by Frances Walls, a longtime Democratic activist in northeast Arkansas. Even a friendly cartoonist portrayed the child governor riding around on a tricycle or peering from the turret of a tank. “It was not easy for a boy to lead in such a conservative state,” reflected Ray Smith, Jr., a Hot Springs legislator who had counseled young Clinton on politics. “To be led by a child, well, Alexander made it, but Jesus didn’t.”

Clinton had no chief of staff. Three executive assistants held nearly equal status. They were young, liberal, and hirsute, and became known as “the Three Beards,” the leaders of the Children’s Crusade. Moore, the oldest at thirty-five, took the lead in politics and legislative matters. Steve Smith, who was Moore’s former seatmate in the Arkansas legislature, supervised the governor’s dealings with state agencies and economic development. Smith had entered the legislature at the dawn of the seventies at the minimum age of twenty-one. Now, after pursuing a doctoral degree in communications and working for Clinton in the attorney general’s office, he was a veteran of state political wars and still only twenty-nine. The third beard belonged to John Danner, thirty-one, who oversaw state-federal relations and long-term planning and took delight in thrashing about in the vast ocean of policy ideas. At his most enthusiastic, Danner, a Berkeley Law School graduate, would march into a meeting with a roll of butcher paper, unroll thirty feet, tape it to a wall, and swiftly write out ten new ideas for the Clinton administration before anyone else in the room could think of one. He and his wife, Nancy Pietrafesa, who also worked in the governor’s office and went by the nickname “Peach,” had met Clinton and Rodham during the Yale years and were two out-of-state friends who heeded the generational call and moved to Little Rock.

Of the triumvirate, only Rudy Moore survived the two years. Danner and Pietrafesa’s stay in Arkansas was short and stressful, marked by constant friction with other aides. When a staff revolt made it obvious that Clinton had to ask them to leave, he could not bring himself to fire them personally and asked Rudy Moore to do it. Smith also left before the term was over, and, like Danner, he left in a way that revealed as much about Clinton as about himself.

As Clinton came to power, one of the high-profile public issues was the clear-cutting of forests by the giant timber companies, especially Weyerhaeuser, a Pacific Coast-based firm that had arrived in Arkansas earlier in the decade and was leveling forest tracts in the Ouachita Mountains and along the route from Little Rock to Clinton’s home town of Hot Springs. Aside from the scientific debate about whether clear-cutting (in which acres of timberland were bulldozed at one time) harmed the wildlife and created pollution runoff problems, the practice enraged citizens driving along scenic highways. Clinton himself, who had grown up surrounded by a national park, was enraged. On a helicopter tour of the clear-cutting acreage near Hot Springs, he was told by a timber lobbyist that clear-cutting looked worse than it was. “Some of the wonderful things in this world don’t look good at first—like the birth of a baby,” the lobbyist said. “Yeah,” Clinton responded, “but at least babies are only born one at a time.”

The struggle around the leveling of the forests of Arkansas was part of a larger and longer one in the economic development in the South. Clinton and Smith had studied the works of C. Vann Woodward and other historians who had chronicled the complicated and sometimes tragic effects of industrialization on an agrarian society. Starting in the 1870s, after the northern timber barons had virtually wiped out the hardwood stands of the Great Lakes region, they were lured south into states like Arkansas that were so eager for what they viewed as capitalist progress that they offered cheap land, cheap labor, and little regulation. The timber companies slashed through the state with no regard for the environment, leveling soft pine forests, setting up sawmills, then abandoning the sites as soon as the resources were exhausted. By 1920, the cut-and-run tactics of the timber companies had denuded Arkansas: more than 20 million acres had been cut, leaving less than 2 million acres of virgin forest. Although Arkansas in later years boasted of prudent forest management, the new clear-cutting practices raised fears of a return to the rapacious timber baron days of old. With these concerns in mind, Clinton established a timber management task force and assigned Smith to serve as staff director.

The task force held thirteen hearings around the state in which they listened to public comments on the issue and examined the effects of clear-cutting from various scientific perspectives. To show the depth of his commitment, Clinton traveled to Nashville, a county seat deep in southwest Arkansas timber country, to chair the first public hearing. As the hearings progressed, the debate became polarized. Smith expressed outrage at the clear-cutting practices, charging that Weyerhaeuser had created the need for the task force because of its “public insensitivity and environmental disregard.” In private meetings of the Arkansas Forestry Association, other timber companies chastised Weyerhaeuser for embarrassing the entire industry by clear-cutting along roadways where the practice was so obvious to passers-by. The message was: If you’re going to clear-cut, at least do it where the public cannot see it so easily. But most of the industry’s wrath was directed at Smith and the governor’s office. John Ed Anthony, the Forestry Association president and the cousin of Democratic congressman Beryl Anthony, called the hearings “zoos” and accused Clinton of “releasing crazies” on the industry.

Anthony began a letterwriting campaign in which he charged that Clinton was no friend of the forest industry and claimed that the governor’s aim was to impose state control of private lands and threaten the livelihood of forty thousand Arkansas voters who made their living in the timber and forest products business. By the end of the hearing process, Clinton was feeling intense political heat. “Every log driver, every sawmill hand, every mill worker was mad at Clinton,” Anthony recalled, and sharing that anger were state legislators from the timber counties who were hearing from the large companies as well as the 240,000 land owners who held timber rights on their property. Clinton arranged a meeting in Pine Bluff with Anthony and the executive committee of the Forestry Association. Without telling Smith, he brought along a draft copy of the task force report, which was critical of the industry and argued that the governor could ban clear-cutting by executive fiat.

Clinton complained to the timber executives that he was being lied about. They were exaggerating his position, he said. He had not made any decisions on the issue and should not be held responsible for speculation in the press or by staff members on what he would do. “Every time I go south of Pine Bluff I run into a buzzsaw of criticism,” he said, according to Anthony. “I don’t think it’s fair and I want it stopped.” When he returned to Little Rock, Clinton ordered several changes, softening the criticisms of the timber industry and removing the threat of mandatory state action against clear-cutters, calling instead for voluntary changes in industry practices. It was also around that time that he appointed a new state forestry commissioner recommended by the timber lobby. Smith responded by submitting his resignation from the task force. He tried to resign from Clinton’s staff altogether, realizing that his longtime friend now considered him a political liability and that he was “not going to be made a knight of the realm.” Rudy Moore persuaded him to stay on for several more months, but his role and enthusiasm were greatly diminished, and Smith eventually left Little Rock to join another departed member of the governor’s staff in the operation of a small bank in Madison County in the hills of northwest Arkansas.

Smith had mostly loved working for Clinton. And yet, in the end, Clinton turned from him when his political survival was endangered. “Bill Clinton pulled the rug out from under Steve Smith,” said Rudy Moore. “Steve thought that he was doing exactly what Bill Clinton wanted. Be a lightning rod. He was willing to accept that role. But Bill then backed away. He felt Steve had cost him politically. That’s when Steve decided to hang it up. He felt he had had enough of doing what he was supposed to do and get chewed on.”

The larger lesson involved fundamentally different perceptions of how politics worked. Smith believed in the straight dialectic. “You win, you do what you can for your side, you screw the opposition. Then if the other side wins, you take what’s coming.” Whereas Clinton’s philosophy, as Smith determined it, was “that you can reach a satisfactory compromise of polar positions that is superior to either side. I see that as more often pissing off both sides.”

Clinton’s conciliatory efforts in the timber controversy were of little avail. In the end, he did end up “pissing off both sides.” It was a case where he seemed to have difficulty appreciating who would be in his corner when he needed them. The industry would work hard to defeat him in the next election and maintained a distrustful relationship with him in later years, even though, as Anthony later boasted, “Bill never really bothered us again.”

IN his formative years, Clinton was rarely around anyone who thought that getting rich was an important goal. Eldridge Cassidy, his beloved pappaw, the town iceman and grocer from Hope, was a generous soul who had little money and would just as soon give away what he had. His mother Virginia wanted only enough to free herself from the chains of an abusive marriage and to place two-dollar bets at the racetrack. Although romanticized accounts of his childhood in Hope and Hot Springs would sometimes make it seem that Bill Clinton rose from poverty, his family was middle class and comfortable by rural Arkansas standards. As a teenager he played golf at a country club and swam at the country club pool and drove his own car. He was never poor enough to be consumed by envy for the wealthy boys and girls around him. If he felt any impulse to prevail over the social elite, he saw the political realm, not the business world, as his arena.

From his high school years through his rise to the governorship, Clinton had steered clear of jobs in private industry and never held a post that paid more than $35,000 a year. He always worked but seemed to have little money. Travel aides remember how he would bum quarters from them on the road to buy soft drinks or a newspaper. Though he wanted to look sharp enough to impress women, he seldom took the trouble to buy new clothes and was known for wearing pants that were an inch too short and an inch too tight. When his brother won a magazine subscription contest in junior high, Clinton boasted only half-jokingly that at least someone in the family had practical abilities. He often told friends that he only wanted enough money in life to buy books, see the world, go to movies, and go out to eat. To be sure, he was usually the last one at the table to pick up a check. Rudy Moore often told the story of accompanying Clinton to the Democratic National Committee mini-convention in Memphis in 1978. Clinton, in his usual position at the center of a conversational huddle in a restaurant lounge, ended up getting the tab. Looking at the ninety-dollar check for a group of eight or ten, he smiled and said, “Gol, this ain’t so bad!”

“Well, um,” Moore felt obliged to note to his boss, “that’s just the bar bill.”

That is not to say that Clinton viewed money as the root of evil or disdained moneymakers. His attitude was more neutral than hostile. In fact, when he could see a direct correlation between money and political success, something that truly motivated him, he excelled at going after the cash. Whether it was sending fundraising letters to the thousands of friends and contacts whose names found their way into his index card files, or spending an hour trying to charm a donation out of a truck company owner, or taking out a large personal loan from a friendly country banker, he had no qualms about asking for money, as long as it was for politics.

It has become an accepted description of the Clinton-Rodham partnership that Clinton was a zigzag and Rodham a straight line; he deceptive and she blunt; he confused and she clearheaded. These characterizations hold up in many areas, but not in all. When it came to money, Clinton’s philosophy seemed clear and his actions tended to follow his philosophy. It was Rodham, here, whose attitudes shifted and whose actions followed a sinuous path.

Rodham’s father taught her how to read the stock tables. The family lived in a suburb populated by the upwardly mobile middle class, where money was considered a measure of virtue, gained through hard work and ingenuity. Then, in college, she came to reject what she described in her Wellesley commencement address as “our prevailing, acquisitive and competitive corporate life.” At Yale Law School, she turned down opportunities to clerk at high-salaried East Coast firms and again avoided that career path after receiving her law degree, choosing instead the nonprofit Children’s Defense Fund, the Watergate impeachment inquiry staff, and a faculty position at the University of Arkansas Law School. As her boyfriend’s and then husband’s political adviser, she often warned him away from taking what she considered tainted money from lobbyists and discouraged him from incurring heavy debts. To some of Clinton’s Arkansas friends, she seemed prudent if not parsimonious.

Then, when Rodham and Clinton reached Little Rock for the start of Clinton’s career in government, Rodham seemed to have little difficulty embracing the acquisitive and competitive corporate life that she had once repudiated. Nothing could have taken her further into the blueblood establishment of Arkansas’s capital city than her decision to join the Rose Law Firm, which traced its roots back to 1820 and claimed to be the oldest legal firm west of the Mississippi. The Rose Law Firm was the legal arm of the powerful, representing, among others, the holy trinity of Arkansas business and industry: Stephens Inc., Tyson Foods, and Wal-Mart. Her position at Rose Law provided Rodham with status and security, but she turned to other ventures in search of fast money. She became, at once, her father’s daughter, a market-watching practitioner of unfettered capitalism, and her family’s provider, trying to look after the financial side of life in a way that her husband would never do. In keeping with the interdependent nature of the Rodham and Clinton partnership, Rodham’s early moneymaking ventures were undertaken in concert with Clinton’s friends.

One of the iconic scenes from the sixties decade came in the 1967 Mike Nichols film The Graduate when Benjamin, the young graduate played by Dustin Hoffman, was approached by a businessman who had a word of advice for him: “Plastics.” That one word in that one scene captured a generation’s struggle between innocent idealism and capitalist realism. In the life of Hillary Rodham, the sequel came eleven years later, in October 1978, when Jim Blair uttered two words to her: “Cattle futures.” Blair, a Springdale lawyer who served as outside counsel to Tyson Foods, was among the most trusted friends of Clinton and Rodham from their Fayetteville days. He was a longtime Democratic party insider who had served as a behind-the-scenes adviser in Clinton’s campaigns. He was romantically involved with, and soon to marry, Diane Kincaid, the political science professor at the University of Arkansas who was in Rodham’s circle of professional women friends and who had known Clinton since the McGovern campaign. Governor Clinton would perform the marriage ceremony for the Blairs in September 1979 and Rodham would attend as their “best person.” The foursome would vacation together for years thereafter, often at the Blairs’ summer cottage on Beaver Lake. They read books together and held rambling discussions on literature, politics, and the fate of the world. As happens with many pairs of couples, Jim often sided with Hillary, practical and lawyerly, and Bill with Diane, more empathetic and political. There was, however, at least one notable occasion when the split followed gender lines. They had all read Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, a novel describing the disillusionment of a woman in her thirties who has divorced her husband, turned away from her friends, and is emotionally adrift in the emptiness of the California desert. Diane and Hillary identified with the character, while Jim and Bill said they could not understand the book. “How,” Clinton asked, “could a woman walk off and do that?”

Clinton and Jim Blair bonded in other ways. They had both grown up in troubled homes. Blair was abandoned by his mother and reared by his paternal grandparents in a modest apartment above an old grocery store in Fayetteville. He and Clinton both had quick and lively minds—Blair graduated from college in two years and had his law degree by age twenty-one. And both loved the art of Arkansas storytelling. They were Southern Baptists who could drop a line of scripture into any conversation or argument. A decade older and more sure of himself, Blair functioned as Clinton’s smooth and confident big brother, introducing him to business figures, offering him confidential advice, helping him out of tight spots. They were both ambitious men who could become obsessed by games. Clinton was obsessed by the politics game. Blair, occasionally, by the money game.

When Blair found a way to win big at the money game by trading on the commodities market, he encouraged several friends and associates to get in on the action, including Rodham, knowing that she understood that world while Clinton did not. By the time he recruited Rodham, Blair had already been playing the cattle market for several months, using the Springdale branch of Ray E. Friedman & Company (Refco) brokerage house to buy and sell on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. His broker there was another member of the extended Tyson network, Robert L. (Red) Bone, a beefy, red-faced good old boy, once described admiringly as “a real razorback,” who had worked his way up from driving a chicken truck to being a Tyson vice president before leaving the poultry industry for the brokerage profession. Clients were plentiful in northwest Arkansas: the Tyson company alone had three corporate investment accounts going through Refco. Brokers were making between $10,000 and $100,000 a month. One young broker boasted that within a two-year period he had accumulated four Corvettes, a Ferrari, a Mercedes, and a boat.

Blair could have kept the branch office in business almost by himself. From the time he started buying and selling cattle futures in March 1978, after determining that Refco had an inside track on where the cattle market was going, he was trading enough to pay Refco an average of $50,000 a month in commissions. There is an old Arkansas saying that even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while, but Blair was counting on anything but blind luck. He maintained a special computer program at his office that analyzed the market averages over four-day, nine-day, and eighteen-day periods. Within easy sight on his desk stood a quote machine, a stock ticker, that allowed him to watch the market all day, “tick by tick,” as he once put it. He had a telephone at his side at all times, in his car, in his airplane, to ensure that he would never be out of position to make a necessary trade. At two-thirty every afternoon, he was allowed to listen in on a conference call coordinated by Refco that included cattle buyers, feedlot operators, Chicago pit traders, and Refco’s Las Vegas—based president, Thomas Dittmer. At its best, his formula of information and intuition brought in more than a half-million dollars in less than a two-week span.

Rodham followed the high-rolling Blair into the market with a thousand-dollar investment on October 11, 1978, less than a month before her husband was elected governor. She kept playing the cattle futures game for nine months, through the middle of July 1979, by which time she had parlayed that first $1,000 into an extraordinary profit of $99,537—more than the combined salaries of herself and her husband that year. It was a wild ride, one in which Rodham, from her long-distance post in Little Rock, benefited from Blair’s advice, his major trading status, and his relationship with Bone and Refco in Springdale.

Playing the commodities market is not like playing the stock market. In the stock market, the most investors can lose is the amount they invest. In the cattle futures market, investors can buy and sell cattle in separate transactions and have to guess correctly whether the prices will rise or fall. If they are locked into contracts to sell at one price at a future date, they hope prices will fall so that they can then buy contracts for that number of cattle at a lower price before the sell date: selling high and buying low. If they buy cattle first, they want the market to rise so that they can sell at a higher price: buying low and selling high. Either way, if they guess right, they can make huge profits; but if they guess wrong, they can lose more than their investment, they can lose the margin between the two prices. If the market moves in the wrong direction and there is a significant potential loss in a client’s position, the broker will ask the inves tor to cover the loss.

It is a nerve-wracking game, and one that not all of Jim Blair’s close friends wanted to play or understand. Diane Kincaid, who was not yet married to Blair when the investments began, said he invested money for her and her children even though she wanted “nothing to do with” the trades. “I thought it was terrible. I hated it. I was very concerned about the stress it put on him and I thought it was an excessive preoccupation,” she said later. “The things that I enjoyed about him were the conversations and the books we’d read together, and this was taking away from all that. I thought whatever the financial reward, there was a negative impact on the quality of our relationship. I was on a rollercoaster unwillingly. He would say, ‘This is a brief wave and I’m going to ride it and then get out.’”

Rodham was more interested than Kincaid. She wanted to learn the game. Following Blair’s advice, she played aggressively, sometimes opening and closing trades on the same day. There were times when she guessed wrong, however, and should have faced margin calls, but she never got one. She seemed to get a break even on her first day in the market, when records show that she ordered ten cattle futures contracts with her $1,000 when that normally requires a 812,000 investment. At one point in July, shortly before she quit playing, she was $60,000 in the red and had only $40,000 in her account, but was not asked to pay the margin, and the market soon turned to her favor. Some other Refco clients caught in similar positions apparently were not given such leeway. A client named Stanley Greenwood later claimed in a lawsuit that during that same period of July he was directed to put in $48,000 to cover his losses. What was special about Rodham? The reason she was allowed to keep playing when she did not have enough money in her account to maintain her trading positions was Jim Blair. He was such a good Refco customer that he protected not only himself but his friends. “They weren’t going to hassle me,” Blair later acknowledged. “And if I brought someone in, they weren’t going to hassle them.”

Rodham closed her Refco account, she would later explain, because the game was so nerve-wracking and she had become pregnant that summer. She could not withdraw cold turkey, however. She opened a new account closer to home, with Stephens Inc. in Little Rock, and let her broker make all the investment decisions. She closed that account in October. Not long thereafter, the cattle market collapsed, sending many investors and brokers into court, where they sued one another and filed for bankruptcy. Hugh Rodham’s daughter was lucky and had the right friends, but she also exhibited a sixth sense about when to stay and when to go—a talent that she would exhibit many times in many ways over the ensuing years.

Her intellect and intuition could not always save Hillary Rodham, however, if the connection turned out to be less reliable than the one she had with Jim Blair. She had less good fortune that year with another investment, a partnership involving the Clintons and another couple, Jim and Susan McDougal, in which they acquired 230.4 acres of undeveloped land along the White River in the Ozarks of north-central Arkansas.

For the first year of Clinton’s term, Jim McDougal was a member of Clinton’s staff, the governor’s liaison to banking and industrial development. At thirty-nine, he was the old hand among the youthful crusaders and the one with the longest connection to Clinton, going back to the Fulbright campaign of 1968. He could often be found with his feet propped up on his desk, gesticulating with his ever present FDR-style cigarette holder, telling a colorful story about his days with Fulbright or making a classical allusion while enhancing an otherwise prosaic bureaucratic encounter. He had a rich speaking voice and what one acquaintance called “a command of the English language better than that of an Oxford don.” His young wife Susan, who had been his student when he taught political science at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia during the mid-1970s, dressed like a New York fashion model and caused quite a commotion during her frequent visits to the Capitol. “She was young and attractive and all that, but we always sort of wondered, ‘What’s her deal?’” recalled Randy White. “She would float in with an air about her, kind of sweeping in. It seemed like a major production when she swept through, calling attention to herself. We kind of looked at them and went, ‘Hmmm.’”

In the summer of 1978, when Clinton was still attorney general but he and Rodham seemed sure bets to occupy the Governor’s Mansion, McDougal had encountered them at a Little Rock restaurant and made his sales pitch on the White River land. He said later that he was in the middle of buying the property when he bumped into the Clintons, and invited them to join in the venture because he thought it would prove profitable and he always enjoyed having partners with whom he could discuss the deal’s progress. Other acquaintances of McDougal said he had another motive as well: he thought having the next governor of Arkansas involved in the deal would make it easier for him to develop and sell the land.

McDougal had been an aggressive entrepreneur since the age of eight and had traveled around the mountain villages of the Ozarks with his greatuncle, selling feed and seed from the back of a truck. He had been making land deals since he was twenty-seven, and had pulled off several successful ones with friends and political associates, including Senator Fulbright, who went in with him on a deal in Conway where they bought the land for $100 an acre, improved and subdivided it, and sold it for $350 an acre. Clinton knew nothing about real estate and had no interest in it, according to McDougal. When he talked to the Clintons, McDougal said later, he dealt with Rodham. They formed a corporation, Whitewater Development Company Inc., and took out a $120,000 loan from the Union National Bank of Little Rock for the down payment on the land and then a $182,000 loan from Citizens Bank and Trust of Flippin to buy the property. They secured the loans with the property itself, and expected to pay off the interest by subdividing the land into forty-two lots and selling them as vacation home sites.

Although Jim McDougal brought the Clintons in on the deal, his wife Susan was the most excited about the property, which the Clintons had never seen and never would bother to visit. Susan had picked it out and was convinced that the land would pay for itself as they developed it. “It was a beautiful development. The water was gorgeous up there,” she said later. “It was a fabulous idea.” In theory, perhaps. But the real estate market soon soured. The lots did not sell quickly. Interest rates soared from 8 to 18 percent. The McDougals, as managing partners, and to a lesser extent the Clintons, began making interest payments on the loans from their own money. For Hillary Rodham, there was no quick cash to be made on the White River.

As to the larger question of Rodham’s changing attitudes toward the acquisition of wealth during that period, the argument can be made that there was a higher consistency at work: her practical sense of doing what it takes to move toward her ultimate goals. Reasons for her saddling up for Jim Blair’s cattle roundup, for instance, were plentiful: Her husband would never be the sort to worry about the family’s financial security; she was an intelligent feminist, who saw no reason not to compete in what was largely a man’s world, and who viewed financial strength as an important means of gaining power and independence. A higher personal income would make it less risky for Clinton to borrow money for political campaigns in the future. All of these are legitimate explanations, and yet there is evidence that Rodham felt her own zigzag, the internal contradiction, and that she was not entirely comfortable with what she was doing.

Rodham and Clinton took a vacation in England the year when she was playing the market. One day they were invited to tea at the home of John and Katherine Gieve. Katherine Gieve, formerly Katherine Vereker, had been a friend of Clinton’s during his Oxford days. Two other close friends from that era, Sara Maitland and Mandy Merck, also came to the tea, along with several left-wing members of a women’s reading group whose slogan was “Why be a wife?” Clinton, according to Merck, seemed years younger than the heavy-lidded, bearded Rhodes Scholar she had remembered from Oxford: “much thinner, closer shaven, with chestnut hair, a shiny blue blazer—not anything like what he wore at Oxford.” Rodham wore large glasses and kept rather quiet. The subject at the tea was equal pay for women. Clinton jumped right into the conversation, saying how hard it was to measure value. “How do you compare the value of a truck driver to the value of a beautician?” he asked. The women were impressed by his knowledge and sensitivity on the issue. “Who is that?” one whispered to Merck. “None other than the governor of Arkansas,” she responded.

Finally the conversation moved on to Rodham. What did she think? “You know,” she said, “I’m beginning to think there must be more to life than this greasy pole, this rat race.” She was talking about the greasy pole of politics and the rat race over money. And she added: “I’m thinking about getting back into religion.” The other women were stunned. They were utterly political creatures who had no context in which to place her remarks. “If she had said, ‘I think I’m going to be a Moonie,’” Merck said later, “she could not have appalled her audience more.”

CHELSEA Victoria Clinton was born on February 27, 1980, seventeen days early. Clinton had been home from a trip to Washington less than fifteen minutes when Hillary went into labor. He had studied the Lamaze method and planned to be in the delivery room, but the birth was difficult and required a Caesarian section. When a nurse finally handed his infant daughter to him, he would not let go of her. “He walked all over the area … holding the baby in his arms,” a hospital official reported. As he looked at his daughter, he realized that he was experiencing something that his own father had never been able to do. “Well,” Clinton later recalled saying to himself, “here’s another milestone he didn’t reach.” The date was reminder enough. February 27 was the date that the family honored as the birthday of W.J. Blythe.

Not long after mother and daughter returned home from the hospital, Carolyn Yeldell Staley, Clinton’s old high school friend, an opera singer who had moved back to Little Rock with her family to work on the state arts council, wrote a song about Chelsea. She sang it in the Governor’s Mansion, accompanying herself on the piano. It was a sentimental ballad written from the perspective of humble parents in awe of their creation. One stanza included the lines, “We may not be worthy, but we’ll try to be wise.” After listening to the song, Rodham approached Staley and said rather coldly, “That’s a nice song, Carolyn. But who’s not worthy? You and your tape recorder?”

THE birth of Chelsea might have been the last good thing to happen to Clinton in 1980. On the American public stage, this was another year of confusion and disillusionment not unlike 1968, except this time along with tragedies and crises there were moments of incompetence and rotten luck piling up in rapid succession. Jimmy Carter went into that final year of his first term with the lowest ratings of any president in modern times, viewed by the liberal wing of his own party as too moderate and tight-fisted on domestic policy and by the larger public as weak and indecisive in foreign affairs. When he attempted to take strong action to counter the latter image, it seemed to compound the problem. When the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, he imposed a grain embargo on the Soviet Union and ordered a boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow, actions which angered midwestern wheat farmers and demoralized the public. When the Iranians would not respond to diplomatic efforts to free dozens of Americans held hostage in Tehran, he ordered a rescue mission that aborted when a U.S. Navy helicopter crashed in the Iranian desert, killing eight servicemen. One unpredictable event after another left Carter and the nation reeling. There were race riots in Miami. Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington State. More than one hundred thousand Cuban refugees, encouraged to leave by Fidel Castro, landed on the beaches of Florida in what was known as the Mariel boatlift.

The state of Arkansas in 1980 was a microcosm of national unease and disarray. Truckers were striking, Ku Klux Klansmen were on the march, tornadoes ripped through the countryside. The economy was turning downward, forcing state revenues below the overoptimistic estimates and costing public school teachers the raises they expected. Although Clinton’s poll ratings remained higher than Carter’s that spring, he sensed that he was in trouble. When Frank White, a beefy, jovial savings and loan executive and former economic development official in the Pryor administration, switched parties and announced that he would challenge Clinton as a Republican in the fall election, Clinton told Rodham that White would start the race with 45 percent of the vote. The young governor feared that he had already angered at least that many people during his first year in office.

A seconding motion came sooner than expected, in the Democratic primary in late May, when Monroe Schwarzlose, the seventy-seven-year-old turkey farmer, drew 31 percent of the vote. The old farmer’s showing was a stunning expression of no confidence in Clinton, since Schwarzlose was the ultimate fringe candidate, who had carried only I percent in the same primary in 1978. It was also a signal to Clinton from the timber industry, which was still raging over the clear-cutting controversy. Schwarzlose fared best in south Arkansas timber counties, where he received behind-the-scenes encouragement from John Ed Anthony.

A few days later, on June 1, a bad situation deteriorated. Suddenly, perhaps inevitably, the troubles of Governor Clinton and President Carter converged in northwest Arkansas, when several hundred Cuban refugees who had come to the United States in the Mariel boatlift rioted and broke out of their resettlement camp at Fort Chaffee. Clinton would be given high marks for his performance under pressure in dealing with the Cuban refugee crisis, but his close friendship with Carter, which became strained in private but did not break in public, was held against him by Arkansas voters. It was also used to great advantage by Republican challenger Frank White and his handlers, who replayed footage of the Fort Chaffee riot to associate Clinton with images of disorder and bad times.

The buildup of tension at Fort Chaffee began in mid-May with the arrival of the first Cubans. Although the sprawling military base had been used as a resettlement center for Vietnamese refugees earlier in the decade with little controversy, nearby residents were alarmed this time by reports that the Cuban contingent included criminals and mental patients. Most of the eighteen thousand refugees sent to Arkansas waited patiently to get processed. But a number of rebellious young men grew more agitated day by day at their confinement. Several hundred of them broke out of the camp on May 26 and created a minor disturbance in a nearby hamlet. Clinton had urged federal officials to tighten security after that to prevent a more serious confrontation with posses of shotgun-toting citizens in towns near the fort. If the federal authorities did not secure the camp within seventy-two hours, Clinton said, he would take action to secure it himself.

Clinton took precautionary steps in that direction. He activated a few dozen National Guardsmen and authorized state police to send troops to the Fort Smith area from all eight sectors of the state. But he was surprised and embarrassed by a second round of disturbances, believing wrongly that the Carter administration by then had resolved a dispute among federal officials over control of the refugees. White House aide Eugene Eidenberg had insisted in conversations with Clinton that the post commander, Brigadier General James (Bulldog) Drummond, had been granted the authority to contain the Cubans inside their relocation camp. Drummond maintained that he had no such authority. On the morning of June 1, after staging a sit-in at the main gate, several hundred Cubans bolted past the military guards, who did nothing to stop them, and marched onto a nearby-highway chanting “Libertad! Libertad!” They were met by a state police squad and retreated to the fort. But late that afternoon, they congregated at the main gate again, this time more than a thousand strong, and again met no resistance from the military guards as they ran out the gate and down the highway, carrying sticks and bottles. The state police had formed a protective line at the edge of the town of Barling. When the Cubans reached them, there was a brief confrontation in which sixty-seven people were injured, including several officers, but mostly Cubans, some of whom had their heads cracked open.

Clinton and James H. Jones, the adjutant general of the Arkansas National Guard, and Jones’s chief of staff, James A. Ryan, flew by helicopter from Little Rock to Fort Chaffee soon after they heard about the riot. Their first meeting was with General Drummond. Ryan had never seen the young governor in a tense situation of that sort before and thought “he asked some very intelligent questions, questions that were relevant.” Jack Moseley, editor of the Southwest Times Record in Fort Smith, was eavesdropping outside the open door. He heard “a lot of shouting and loud voices” and Drummond saying that it was not the Army’s fault because it was restricted by law from intervening. A voice that Moseley identified as Clinton’s responded by saying, “Well shit, General, who left the wirecutters in the stockade if none of this was the military’s fault?”

After the meeting with Drummond, Clinton activated two National Guard battalions and an infantry company and had them stationed outside the gates. He then had his staff arrange a meeting with community leaders and concerned residents, first in Barling, then in Jenny Lind. The crowds were hostile at first. At Barling, one local official jumped up on his chair and shook his fist at the governor. At Jenny Lind, Clinton hopped up on the back of a pickup truck parked under a shade tree, surrounded by angry local men carrying shotguns. Moseley, who would endorse Frank White later that year in editorials that excoriated Clinton, nonetheless came away from the Fort Chaffee incident impressed by Clinton’s behavior under pressure: “I think he showed a tremendous amount of fortitude. He took charge. He accepted responsibility. He behaved in a responsible manner. He listened to what the military commander had to say and went toe to toe with the White House.” Eidenberg, the White House official in charge of the refugee situation, arrived at Fort Smith in the middle of the night and was met by Clinton, who “in no uncertain terms” made clear to him that “it was his judgment that the dispute over the law enforcement authority question had made possible an event that did not have to happen.”

Eidenberg agreed. At a press conference held at two-thirty that morning, he pledged that no more Cubans would be sent to Arkansas.

WITH more troops stationed outside the gates and the dispute over military authority resolved, there were no more refugee uprisings that summer. But the Fort Chaffee drama was only at intermission, soon to be resumed, and other troubles kept coming at Clinton nonstop. A sense of imminent disaster permeated the governor’s office. If a telephone rang after office hours, aides would joke, “Don’t answer it—they’ll probably want the National Guard!” The state broiled in a heatwave that took the lives of several older citizens, led to the suffocating deaths of thousands of poultry chicks, and made life generally miserable for an already grousing populace. Even more troublesome was the car tags issue, which would not go away. Every month, one-twelfth of the car owners in the state erupted in anger as they had their license tags renewed and were required to pay fees that had increased by as much as tenfold. Although the licenses still went for relatively modest sums, the tax became an easy and obvious target of public discontent—all of it directed not at the legislature but at Clinton.

It reached the point where chief of staff Rudy Moore felt that they could not please anybody. He thought of it as a wave of hostility building, month after month. By July, Clinton realized that the wave might drown him. One day, after giving speeches in El Dorado and Texarkana, he returned to the office staggering from the negative reaction he was getting.

“Rudy, they’re killing me out there!” he said to Moore. “They hate my guts!”

“What are you talking about?” Moore asked.

“The car tags,” said Clinton. “A man came up to me and said, ‘I’m havin’ a hard enough time makin’ a livin’, and you’re kickin’ me while I’m down.’ They’re killing me out there, Rudy.”

On August 1, Clinton came to believe that his own president was among those killing him. Word came from the White House that all Cuban refugees still being housed at resettlement camps in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida would be transferred to a single consolidated camp at Fort Chaffee. Only two months earlier, Gene Eidenberg had visited Fort Chaffee and promised that no more Cubans would be sent there. Now, the White House officials had changed their minds. Travel aide Randy White was in the room at the Governor’s Mansion when Clinton got the news and remembers that his boss pounded his desk and launched into an obscenity-laced protest that, considering the circumstances, amounted to a rather normal reaction.

“You’re fucking me!” White heard Clinton shout into the phone at a White House official. “How could you do this to me? I busted my ass for Carter. You guys are gonna get me beat. I’ve done everything I could for you guys. This is ridiculous! Carter’s too chickenshit about it to tell me directly!”

Clinton nonetheless promised to keep the story quiet over the weekend until Eidenberg could travel to Arkansas to explain the situation directly to people in the communities near Fort Chaffee. Word leaked out later that day from Senator Pryor’s office. When the press asked Clinton if he could confirm Pryor’s claim, he acknowledged that he had known about the White House decision. He had agreed to Eidenberg’s request to keep quiet, he said, because he hoped to spend the weekend persuading administration officials to change their minds. The decision, Clinton told reporters, was the most politically damaging one Carter could make. Placing the final resettlement camp in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Florida would have been smarter, he argued, because Carter had a better chance of carrying Arkansas in the fall election than any of those states. Now, he shared Pryor’s assessment that Carter’s chances in Arkansas were shot.

What more could Clinton do besides cuss out the White House in private and bemoan the political consequences in public? Many of his aides thought that he should “kick and fuss and holler and just tell Jimmy Carter no,” in Rudy Moore’s words. Clinton was not prepared to go that far. One reason was historical and emotional: he saw too many modern-day parallels to what he considered to be Arkansas’ day of infamy in 1957, when Governor Faubus evoked states’ rights to defy federal authorities seeking to desegregate Little Rock Central High School. If the people of Arkansas wanted a provincial demagogue, they would have to look elsewhere. There were many things Clinton would do to try to win an election, but that was not one of them.

There was, to be sure, a broader political consideration as well. As unpopular as Carter might be in Arkansas, he was still president; he was still heavily favored to prevail over challenger Edward Kennedy and win renomination at the Democratic National Convention to be held in New York less than two weeks later. Clinton had signed up as a floor whip for Carter at the convention. He had been chosen to give a primetime convention speech as the spokesman for the Democratic governors, after being among those considered for an even more coveted assignment as the keynote speaker. He had strong connections to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, John C. White, the former Texas agriculture commissioner who had been one of Clinton’s patrons since the 1972 McGovern campaign. He was still enjoying insider status as Carter’s man in Arkansas, sought out for patronage decisions, consulted on domestic programs, invited to briefings on foreign affairs. A too-public break with Carter now might jeopardize what remained of their special relationship.

That weekend Clinton traveled to Denver for the annual meeting of the National Governors Association, where most of the talk among the twenty-four Democratic governors in attendance was about maneuvering between Carter and Kennedy on convention rules and the party platform. Suppressing his sense of betrayal, Clinton worked to shore up support for the president among the other governors. On the afternoon of August 4, he talked on the telephone with Carter, who was at the White House. Gene Eidenberg, who was also at the governors’ conference, monitored the conversation. Clinton tried but failed to talk the president out of the Fort Chaffee decision, instead only gaining a promise that the state would play a central role in the development of a new security policy at the refugee camp. Although most people viewed the decision through a political lens, Carter insisted that politics had nothing to do with it. Fort Chaffee was chosen on its merits, as a warm-weather site that had the most suitable facilities. At a meeting at Fort Chaffee the next day, Eidenberg officially announced the consolidation plan and tried to explain that his earlier pledge not to send any more Cubans to Arkansas was rendered “inoperative” by circumstances which could not have been foreseen. “I understand,” Eidenberg said, “why that statement made then and the decision made now, being announced now, is being viewed, let’s be frank with each other, as a lie, as a breaking of my word, and worse, a breaking of the word of the President of the United States.”

CLINTON and Rodham had friends on both sides of the Carter and Kennedy fight. Some called it a struggle for the soul of the Democratic party, but it was fought as much out of weariness and confusion as out of passion. Kennedy supporters thought Carter was foundering because he had turned away from fundamental liberal doctrine and had gotten lost in compromise and vacillation. Carterites believed that Kennedy was waging a futile symbolic struggle for a governing philosophy from which the American public had long since turned away.

Although Rodham was considered the more liberal member of the partnership, she had no trouble choosing sides in this dispute. On a trip to San Francisco, she stayed at the home of Fred Altshuler, her friend from the House impeachment inquiry staff, who held a dinner party in her honor. The Kennedy versus Carter battle dominated the conversation. Altshuler was highly critical of Carter and made an impassioned case for Kennedy. Rodham derided him, defending, it seemed, not only the president but her husband by inference. “She said she was talking about practical politics and I was talking about impractical politics,” Altshuler recalled. “She was saying, ‘You have to look at who can get elected and what he can accomplish.’ She was definitely in a minority. There were not any other Carter supporters at the dinner. But she held her position.”

Clinton’s friends in the Kennedy camp had no better luck. Carl Wagner, a Kennedy aide who had worked with Clinton at Project Pursestrings and served as George McGovern’s coordinator in Michigan when Clinton was in Texas, talked with Clinton often that summer. He found Clinton’s support of Carter unshakable, even after the Cuban refugee fiasco. Wagner understood. All his friends were seeing their way through that race on their own terms. As a southern governor seeking reelection, an association with Teddy Kennedy would have done Clinton no good.

Clinton was now more than a decade removed from his Oxford days as an antiwar protester, eight years beyond the McGovern struggle, six years past the Watergate scandal. It all seemed so long ago. Mandy Merck, the radical lesbian who had befriended Clinton at Oxford, realized what a different world he was now moving in when she looked him up at the Democratic National Convention in New York. Merck was covering the convention for Time Out, a counterculture magazine in London. She had no credentials, only a note on Clinton’s official stationery inviting her to a reception for the Arkansas delegation. All of the stereotypes that Merck had carried about Clinton’s Arkansas, impressions that he had fostered with his stories of old farmers and huge watermelons, were smashed when she walked into the reception room. Here was a congregation of yuppies: lots of dark suits, a smattering of jewel-studded denim jeans, the aura of money and power and sex in the air. Clinton looked like a well-groomed young banker. He greeted her warmly, and started to introduce her around the room. In his thickest Arkansas accent, his eyebrows raised in his classic can-you-believe-this? style, he would say, “I want you to meet a real Marxist-feminist from London, England.”

Two days later, Merck met Clinton in his hotel room for an interview. She told him she was surprised to learn that he was working as a floor whip for Carter opposing a platform plank on federally funded abortions. If women were seeking abortions as a matter of choice rather than health, Clinton told her, then he thought they should pay rather than the taxpayers. Merck was tempted to argue with him, but decided, “What’s the point? I’m not going to change his mind.” Clinton changed the subject to his convention speech. He hoped it would be in prime time.

Hours before delivering the speech, Clinton received a telegram from Carolyn Yeldell Staley. “Energize us,” she wrote. “Renew our flickering faith that leadership does care, and that government can respond. America waits.” Whether Clinton energized his audience that night is open to debate. But it is fair to say that his speech, which he wrote himself, was the shortest, clearest address that he would ever give at a Democratic convention—a cogent analysis of the troubled, transitional period that the Democratic party was enduring.

Simply putting together the old elements of the Democratic coalition and repudiating Ronald Reagan was not enough anymore, Clinton said. The Democrats had to start looking for “more creative and realistic” solutions to the nation’s problems. “We were brought up to believe, uncritically, without thinking about it, that our system broke down in the Great Depression, was reconstructed by Franklin Roosevelt through the New Deal and World War II, and would never break again. And that all we had to do was try to reach out and extend the benefits of America to those who had been dispossessed: minorities and women, the elderly, the handicapped and children in need. But the hard truth is that for ten long years through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, this economic system has been breaking down. We have seen high inflation, high unemployment, large government deficits, the loss of our competitive edge. In response to these developments, a dangerous and growing number of people are simply opting out of our system. Another dangerous and growing number are opting for special interest and single interest group politics, which threatens to take every last drop of blood out of our political system.”

GOVERNOR Clinton was a creature of habit. When someone went in to brief him on a subject or upcoming event, his habit was to keep doing some other activity, either reading or writing, at the same time that he was being briefed. Every half-minute or so, without looking at the aide, he would blurt out, “What else”—not as a question but as a sign that he had catalogued the information and it was time to move on. They were two of Clinton’s most frequently uttered words: What else. What else. What else. He was always working the telephone in search of inside information: much like his friend Jim Blair, who sought constant reports on cattle futures, only Clinton wanted the latest reading on Clinton political futures, up or down. He would end many conversations with another of his favorite phrases: “Keep your ear to the ground.” He was a young man of oversized appetites. Any aide who spent time with him could tell stories of his inhaling apples in a few massive bites, swallowing them core and all. Hot dogs went down so fast that they barely touched his teeth. The mansion cook could not bake chocolate chip cookies fast enough. Plates of enchiladas and nachos disappeared in seconds. What else. What else. What else.

He was competitive, always looking for a challenge. He put a pinball machine in the game room in the basement of the red brick Governor’s Mansion. One day seven-year-old Matt Moore, Rudy’s son, stood on a box to reach the levers and rang up a score of 800,000 points, lighting up the whole machine. The governor could not believe it. A child had broken his record. When everyone had left for the night, Clinton stayed up, Billy the pinball wizard, shooting, pounding, leaning, tilting, until two in the morning, determined to reclaim the record. What else. What else. What else.

For all of the frustrations that came with being around Bill Clinton, most of the people who fell into his orbit found it exhilarating. Life around him, they said, seemed more vital, closer to the edge, less routine, more physically and intellectually challenging. But in the final months of the 1980 election, Clinton’s “what else” personality took a dangerous turn. It started to seem less a product of boundless energy and more a reflection of self-absorption. To Moore, he seemed distracted, unable to focus as he should, unwilling to make clear decisions. People would approach travel aide Randy White and ask what was the matter with the governor: “They’d tell me when they would meet him or shake his hand, it seemed that he was looking at the next person in the room, the next person to talk to. I had a lot of friends comment that he really wasn’t listening to them.” Moore thought it might be a midlife crisis, a private conflict between Clinton and Rodham, something involving Clinton and the other women who hovered nearby wherever he went.

Clinton’s behavior was a symptom of something larger. He was fighting his own emotions related to ambition and expectations. For most of his life, people had been talking about how he would be president someday. Those great expectations had both carried him along and circumscribed his path. He often seemed to be doing things because they were what someone who might be president should do. Or, occasionally, in rebellion, because they were precisely what a future president should not do. In either case, it was reactive. And when the public started to turn against him, it left him at a loss.

His reelection campaign organization provided little help. It was directed by well-meaning but inexperienced newfound friends from the Little Rock country club and business set who had little sense of how to react in an unexpectedly tense situation. When Frank White’s campaign team began running television commercials depicting the Cuban refugee riot at Fort Chaffee, Clinton’s lead dropped 10 percentage points in one week. There was no response. Clinton could not believe that people would blame him for it. When he tried to turn the Fort Chaffee aftermath to his advantage by traveling up to Fort Smith and personally handing out federal reimbursement checks, he was blasted for partisan pandering by editor Jack Moseley in a front-page editorial in the Southwest Times Record The publisher of the Times Record, who owned several newspapers in Arkansas, ordered Moseley’s editorial reprinted on the front page of all of them, including the newspaper in Hot Springs, Clinton’s home town, which so enraged Virginia Dwire that she stormed down to the office of the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record and canceled her subscription.

Hillary Rodham, who again had become an issue because of her use of a different last name, was enraged, too, and tried in the final weeks to assert control over the campaign. She began reworking her husband’s schedule day by day. With eight days left, she placed an emergency long-distance call in search of Dick Morris. The New York pollster had been deposed from Clinton’s inner circle before the campaign, replaced by Peter Hart, a nationally regarded Democratic pollster. The marks against Morris were varied. Some of Clinton’s aides distrusted him as a mercenary who represented Republicans as well as Democrats. Others thought of him as an evil force willing to do anything to win a campaign. Clinton himself had contradictory feelings about Morris. Before the 1978 election, when they were plotting Pryor’s race together, they were brothers. Once Clinton was in office, Morris felt a distance in their relationship. It was, he said later, as though Clinton “had gone from being a practical hard-nosed political operative to being a Boy Scout.” Morris started to feel that Clinton thought of him as “something dirty, that he didn’t want to touch without gloves.”

When it came time to fire Morris, Clinton backed away from doing it face to face. At their final meeting, the governor complained that Morris’s polls did not seem as thorough as Peter Hart’s. He also, according to Morris, declared at that meeting: “You are an assault to my vanity. Politics is what I do best and you do it as well as I do.” Morris later concluded that Clinton was setting him up to be fired. Two weeks afterward, an aide in the governor’s office called and said his services were no longer needed.

Until now, when the campaign was disintegrating with eight days to go. Now, Hillary Rodham made the practical decision that they needed Morris back. She called his house in New York City. Morris’s wife, Eileen McGann, answered the phone. “We’re losing. Frank White’s gaining. He’s hitting us with negatives. They’re working. We need Dick,” Rodham said. “He’s got to come to Arkansas right away.”

Morris was not home, McGann said, and in any case, Clinton had fired him and he had other candidates to work for now. Rodham tracked him down in Florida, where he was advising the Republican Senate candidate, Paula Hawkins. She persuaded him to come to Arkansas for the final days of the campaign. Morris took a final poll that showed Clinton under 50 percent, which for an incumbent he took to be fatal. They put up a final negative ad against White, but with little hope that it could make a difference. Nothing could go right. On Saturday, November 1, Clinton attended a Razorback football game at Little Rock’s War Memorial Stadium. Arkansas was playing Rice, the perennial doormat of the Southwest Conference. Rice won 17-16. “This,” Clinton said, “is the last straw.” In private, he started attacking himself. “God, I’m an idiot!” he said. “I should have seen it coming. How could I be so dumb!” Morris noticed a clinical detachment in Clinton’s lament. It seemed to him that Clinton “was more hurt that he had screwed up as a politician than that he had screwed up as a governor.”

Clinton ended the campaign with a fundraiser in El Dorado at the home of Richard Mason, an environmental activist who owned an energy company. The crowd was large and enthusiastic, which temporarily lifted Clinton’s spirits. But while the guests mingled, he spent much of the night in the kitchen, working the telephone, getting reports from his county coordinators around the state. The reports were not encouraging. There were not enough volunteers for the get-out-the-vote effort on Tuesday. After the event, Clinton retreated to Mason’s guest house down the path from the main residence. His light stayed on most of the night. The next morning, after Clinton had gone, Mason went to the guest house to clean up. He found a deck of cards that Clinton had left behind. The governor had been playing solitaire; he had lost the last game. Mason noticed that the playing cards were adorned with pictures of the presidents of the United States.