THE ONLY TRACK
—JOHN F. KENNEDY
“Someone once said you don’t understand politics until you’ve been defeated—then all the mysteries become apparent.”
CLINTON AND RODHAM were still at the Governor’s Mansion when the early returns started coming in on election night. They had an open line to Rudy Moore in the campaign headquarters war room on the second floor of an old Victorian house near the Arkansas Capitol. As soon as Moore received the first results from Texarkana, he passed them along to Clinton, who immediately grasped their meaning. He could analyze the voting boxes better than anyone in the campaign. He knew the precise totals that he had received in every county in the state in the past two elections. Now he was carrying Texarkana, but with numbers far below what he needed. At the same hour that his supporters at the Camelot Hotel were shouting with joy at a television network’s premature declaration that he would win, Clinton was swearing into the telephone, raging at his fate. It was over. He had lost.
His first wave of anger passed quickly, and by the time he and Rodham reached campaign headquarters he appeared calm and analytical, the political scientist again picking apart the data of defeat. Rodham remained more emotional. One friend noticed that she was trembling slightly, struggling to keep her composure, as she walked down the hallway with her husband and entered a private room to take a condolence call from Ted Kennedy.
Clinton had lost before, but none of his previous defeats compared with this one. This was catastrophic. Maybe the Oxonian curse had found another victim. At thirty-four, he fit the ironic description of the quintessential Rhodes Scholar: someone with a great future behind him. He had attained the achievement of being the youngest defeated governor in American history and only the third Arkansas governor in the twentieth century to be denied a second two-year term. His reaction, characteristically, was of two parts. Here he was whining, feeling sorry for himself. There he was resolved, plotting a comeback course.
The petulant side of Clinton’s personality sought to place blame on people and factors beyond his control. The press was his first target. He phoned Bill Simmons, the Associated Press bureau chief in Little Rock, a journalist known for fair-mindedness, and screamed about how Simmons had conspired to get him defeated. Simmons was puzzled by the attack and thought the governor seemed out of control. That Clinton deigned to talk to him was unusual: he gave most of the statehouse press corps the silent treatment for several weeks, brushing them off at public appearances with a wave of the hand. He was more accommodating to national journalists, although when David Broder of The Washington Post visited Little Rock shortly after the election, Clinton chided him, only half-jokingly, for mentioning the young governor in a Parade magazine account as someone who might someday be president. Clinton later carried a similar complaint to a meeting of the Society for Professional Journalists in Little Rock, where he broke his post-defeat silence by claiming that he had been unfairly portrayed as an overambitious young man interested in the governor’s job only as a steppingstone.
Clinton also took aim at Jimmy Carter, who had lost to Ronald Reagan.
“The guy screwed me and never tried to make amends,” he told Rick Stearns, his political confidant, from the Oxford days, in a late night telephone conversation. During an informal meeting with David Broder over a cup of coffee at the Governor’s Mansion, Clinton seemed consumed by bitterness toward the president. He said that he had warned Carter administration officials that their handling of the Cuban refugee crisis at Fort Chaffee would be a political disaster for everyone, but that the White House would not listen. When Carter belatedly expressed regret that Fort Chaffee might have played a role in Clinton’s defeat, Clinton responded with a touch of sarcasm that did not humor the earnest president: he told the press that he was “coming to Washington with a few refugees” for Carter to sponsor.
In the interregnum before the end of his term, Clinton traveled to Washington frequently and spent less time than usual in the governor’s office. When he was in Arkansas, he seemed sometimes to be overtaken by self-pity. One day he invited several aides to lunch at the Tracks Inn at the old railroad station down the hill from the Capitol. As they sat around the table after lunch, Clinton launched into a melodramatic soliloquy on what he should do next. Should he practice law in Little Rock? Should he compete for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, which would entail a move to Washington and a six-figure salary? Should he take another high-visibility public interest post being dangled in front of him by a progressive alternative to the religious right, People for the American Way, which was looking for a new chairman, preferably a Southern Baptist?
This was not his most sympathetic audience. No one else at the table had any plans or job offers because they had not expected to be out of work so soon. “You sonofabitch!” said Randy White. “You’ve got every offer. You can do all these things. What are we gonna do? What am I gonna do? You’ve got everything in the world!” After they returned to the office, a chastened Clinton spent the remainder of the afternoon strolling from desk to desk, asking his staff members what he could do for them and how he could help them find new jobs.
Clinton’s own job offers included more than those he had mentioned to his staff at lunch. One day he took a call from Governor Jerry Brown of California, who suggested that Clinton and Hillary should move to the West Coast and reestablish a political base there, in a state more attuned to their progressive politics. To help Clinton get started, Brown offered him a job as his chief of staff in Sacramento. Clinton mentioned the proposal to Mickey Kantor, a longtime Brown friend and Los Angeles lawyer who worked with Rodham on the board of the Legal Services Corporation. “I indicated to him for a lot of reasons that might not be the most productive thing you could do,” Kantor later recalled. At the same time, Kantor was also serving a dual role in the maneuvering for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairmanship. As the law partner of Charles Manatt, he was leading the campaign to get Manatt the job; and as a friend of Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, he was advising Clinton that it would be the wrong move for him. Kantor was awed by what he saw as Clinton’s political potential: after their first meeting a few years earlier, he had gone back to California and told his friends that he had just met a young man who would be president someday. But running the DNC, Kantor told Clinton now, would not help him reach that ultimate goal. The national party was not held in high repute, especially in the South. Anyone who wanted to run again in Arkansas would have difficulty surviving the association with the party.
There was, in Clinton’s case, often a fine line between self-absorption and humility. At any hour of day or night he would flip through his bulging file of index cards, dialing friends from around the country for long talks and confessionals. He had blown it, he would say. He had his career exactly where he wanted it, and he had blown it. In grocery stores, he cornered friends and asked what he had done wrong. He took solace wherever he could find it. One day he invited a group of Pentecostal ministers in to pray with him. He called himself “about as popular as the plague.”
During a trip to Fayetteville, Clinton made a guest appearance at Diane Blair’s class on politics and literature. He analyzed some of the more complex and compelling political characters in literature, including Willie Stark, the corrupt, populist southern governor in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, and Pietro Spina, the disillusioned hero of Ignazio Silone’s anti-Fascist novel Bread and Wine. He also discussed several biographies that had helped shape his perspective, including ones of Lincoln, Hitler, and Churchill. Political leaders, he said, were usually a combination of darkness and light. The darkness of insecurity, depression, family disorder. In great leaders, the light overcame the darkness. Near the end of class, one student asked why, given all the choices open to him, Clinton had committed himself to the political life. His response revealed that his urge was so deep and strong that he never saw it as a choice. He framed his answer in the language of his mother, a woman who loved nothing better than to watch the races of her thoroughbreds: the ponies at Oaklawn and her son Bill the candidate.
Why politics? Clinton was asked.
“It’s the only track I ever wanted to run on,” he replied.
THE only track….
When Billie Carr, the tough old Godmother of Texas liberals who had trained Clinton in the ways of Lone Star politics in 1972, heard that he had lost, she thought it was “the end of his dream.” Then he called her one night and launched into one of his patented, breathless assessments of what went wrong.
“What now?” Carr asked when he was through.
“Well, Billie,” he said. “I’m gonna start working for the next time.”…
Woody Bassett, a young Fayetteville lawyer who had taken classes from Clinton and Rodham when they taught at Arkansas, was heading toward his seat at Razorback Stadium on a bitterly cold Saturday afternoon a few weeks after the election. Through the din of the college football crowd, Bassett heard someone shouting his name: “Woody! Hey, Woody! Bassett!” He turned around. There was Bill Clinton, running toward him. It was the first time he had seen Clinton since his defeat.
“Governor,” he said, “I’m awfully disappointed that you lost.”
“Tell you what,” Clinton said, pointing his oversized index finger at Bassett’s chest. “I’m gonna run for governor again. I’m gonna get that job back. I want you to help me.”…
Clinton called Rudy Moore out to the mansion. He and his wife had been brainstorming. “Here’s an idea, let’s talk about it,” Hillary Rodham said, as Clinton and Moore shot a casual game of pool. The idea was to call a special session of the legislature to repeal the unpopular increase in car license fees which had played a role in his defeat. Frank White would repeal the fee increases as soon as he got in office, Clinton said. “If it’s gonna happen anyway, why should that guy get the credit?” Moore argued against the special session, saying it was too late to placate the general public and that all this would do was rile the highway lobby, which was already planning how to spend the money to build more roads. Moore won the argument, but he and Randy White, who was also at the mansion, came away with one overriding thought: Clinton was already running for election.
The only track…
THE comeback began with two telephone calls. Rodham called Dick Morris again and said he had to return to Little Rock immediately to begin working on the next campaign. And Clinton called Betsey Wright. His political life was a mess, he told her. His staff was demoralized and despondent. Some of them were mad at him. He felt, to some degree, that he had let them down, and vice versa. Hillary had tried to make it clear to the staff that there was a lot of “cleaning up” to do before they turned things over to Frank White. She had assumed the role of bad cop to get that word across, but it had only ended in a harsh exchange with Rudy Moore. “The problem here is that these people have to look for other jobs,” Moore had explained, to which Hillary had replied, “Well, that may be true, but we’ve got to get this goddamn work done!” But Clinton did not feel comfortable turning to his staff for much help, which he needed immediately.
He told Wright that he needed an outsider to come down to Little Rock to gather all of his records and sort through the substance and the remains of his career. He needed a trainer to get him back on the track. Wright, who was between jobs after having spent most of the seventies as an organizer in the women’s political movement in Washington, was intrigued. She had known Clinton and Rodham since the McGovern campaign, and she felt both an intuitive understanding of him and an impulse to help him. She was, in a sense, almost part of the family. Within days of taking the call, Wright was on the job. She slept in the guest house at the mansion at first, until Tom Williamson, Clinton’s Oxford friend, arrived for a buckup visit, and they moved her to the basement, where she slept amid the sea of files. She worked day and night and on weekends, assisted by Gloria Cabe, the Clinton campaign worker and former Little Rock representative, who had also been defeated that year. On Thanksgiving Day, Clinton and Rodham took baby Chelsea with them down to Virginia’s house in Hot Springs, leaving Wright behind. They forgot to bring her back any leftovers.
Some of the raw political data Wright and Cabe sorted through had been computerized over the years, but most of the essential information about his political network of supporters remained on loose slips of paper or on three-by-five-inch index cards, now totaling more than ten thousand, that had been maintained by Clinton and his aides over the years, and were stored in shoe boxes and old wooden library card catalogue files. If Clinton was to rebuild his political career, these cards were the bricks with which he would do it. Each card recorded a piece of his history and reflected his relentless campaign style. On the top right corner was the county where the subject of the card lived, or, if the name was from out of state, the era in which that person came into Clinton’s life: Georgetown, Oxford, Yale, McGovern campaign. Running down the left-hand side of the card were dates, starting with the first time Clinton had met the person and every important contact they had had since. In the middle were names, telephone numbers, addresses, sometimes contribution amounts. Another row of dates noted when that person had received a letter from Clinton or his aides known as a GTMY: for Glad to Meet You.
THE youngest former governor in American history left the mansion one morning in January 1981 with his wife and daughter and moved to Midland Avenue on the near west side, to a yellow frame house tucked under the trees, with a wraparound porch and a carport. They lined the walls with built-in bookcases. In an unlikely binge of consumerism, Clinton went on a shopping spree, buying kitschy gingerbread pieces and garish knick-knacks and gargantuan German furniture. Hillary would come home from work and sigh, “Oh, Bill’s been shopping again!” They hired a nurse from the former mansion staff to take care of Chelsea. Clinton went off to work every day at the law firm of Wright, Lindsey & Jennings in the Worthen Bank Building, where he held an office and the title “Of Counsel.”
He pretended that he was enjoying this new private life, but his friends and associates could see that he hated it. He had to worry about things that had not concerned him before, from laundry to baby-sitters. He looked pathetic and out of place in the law office, thought Dick Morris, who often visited him there on political missions. “Everything about it smacked of penance and defeat,” Morris recalled. “Everything about it was ‘This is what I’m doing because I screwed up.ߠThe image that stays in my mind is of this tall guy, folded into a chair, stuffed underneath a small desk in a small room with the walls crowding him closely, and having to go out and search for someone in the steno pool to do his work, and just being incredibly oversized for the environment in which he was cast. He would very often be soulful: ‘Gee, do you think I can come back? Do you think I’ve had it?’ He would talk about the great people who got voted out of office. He was like a patient afflicted with cancer wondering if he had any chance of survival.”
Just as Clinton had to find his way through the psychological debris of defeat, so, too, did Rodham. She had not expected to be the wife of a former politician so soon. For Arkansans to reject her was one thing; but for them to reject Clinton, whom she had regarded as the state’s favorite son, seemed unthinkable. In a letter to Don Jones, her former Methodist youth minister who was now teaching theology in New Jersey, she tried to sort out what had happened. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the irrationality of politics and why people become so irrational,” she wrote. “I remember once talking to you when I was in high school about a relative of mine who every now and then became caught up in an irrational mood, and how you put it in such simple terms and said, ‘Have you ever seen anyone lose their temper? And how people can lose control of their good sense in moments of passion?’ And you helped me in understanding.”
Nowhere in the letter did Rodham mention what had happened in the election. Years later, rereading that letter, Jones pieced together what was going through her mind. In bringing back his old advice, she had reached a classically Rodhamesque conclusion. She considered herself rational and her logic told her that her husband should have been reelected. Therefore his rejection was an act of irrationality inflamed by passion.
Rodham offered a more political analysis of her husband’s defeat at a conference in late February at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. Her performance there was characterized by the Arkansas Gazette as “semi-gracious” but “totally spunky and eloquent.” The losing campaign’s first problem, she asserted, was that too many Clinton supporters thought it would be an easy election and were not as energized as they should have been. Furthermore, she said, “a political campaign has come down to a thirty-second war on television”—and the Clinton organization lost that war badly to Frank White. Their television commercials were ineffective, she said, and they reacted too slowly to White’s negative attack in which he used grainy black and white film of the Cuban refugees rioting at Fort Chaffee to portray Clinton as an ineffective leader. When she first saw the Cuban refugee ad, Rodham thought, “I can’t believe anyone will believe this.” She considered it racist, noting that all the rioters in the film were black. Only too late, she said, did they realize that “it was not fair or accurate, but it was very effective.”
Many of her friends from outside Arkansas were concerned about Rodham’s well-being in the aftermath of the election. Did she feel stuck in that remote place with an embittered husband whose ambitions had been stymied? Fred Altshuler decided to check up on her. “I knew what she had gone through just to go to Arkansas in the first place,” Altshuler recalled. “I wanted to see how she was doing.” He ventured out to Little Rock from San Francisco and slept on their couch at the Midland Avenue house. After hanging out for a few days, he decided that he had been too apprehensive about his friend’s trauma. He visited Hillary and Bill at their law offices. She seemed engrossed in her work and Clinton bored by his. Altshuler talked about referring some cases to Clinton, “but he seemed much more interested in politics.” They held a large dinner party at their house and Betsey Wright was there along with several professors—Arkansas people all talking Arkansas politics for hours on end. Hillary was right in the middle of the conversation.
She seemed perfectly at home there, Altshuler decided, more comfortable than when she had visited him in San Francisco and defended Jimmy Carter at a dinner party full of liberals. Hillary, Altshuler concluded, “was as much into the Arkansas kind of situation as Bill, which was the thing I had been curious about. I didn’t know how she would react, having lost. She seemed to be doing fine.”
As the weary winter dissolved into spring, Rodham spent some of her spare time planting a flowerbed in her yard and asked for advice on colors of lawn furniture. Clinton once called a friend and proudly boasted that he had just finished cleaning the kitchen: “It’s spick and span,” he said. But these were only random scenes of domestic bliss. The Clinton and Rodham relationship was rarely without tension, and in the months after the defeat the tension had heightened. Clinton seemed the more unhappy and distracted. One Saturday morning a friend stopped by the house and found him in the den, playing on the floor with Chelsea. Rodham was in the kitchen. As he smiled and laughed with his one-year-old daughter, Clinton sang softly in the lilt of a gentle lullaby, but loud enough for his guest to hear: “I want a div-or-or-or-orce. I want a div-or-or-or-orce.”
NEVER fond of the deskbound life, Clinton spent several months in 1981 traveling the state, running as long and as hard as a noncandidate could run. Randy White, who had not found other employment, often served as his driver and travel aide. They would take White’s Thunderbird, and scrounge around for gasoline money and a quarter to buy the Gazette. Betsey Wright, from her post outside Clinton’s law office door, was running the show, setting up appointments at the same time that she was overseeing the transfer of his index cards onto a new computer system, bringing his political operation into the high-tech era. High school graduations, community meetings on toxic waste dumps—Clinton would go anywhere and talk to anyone who would listen to him. When asked pointblank, “Are you running for governor again?” he would demur, saying he was still weighing his options. Then, back in the car with White, he chortled, “Man, this thing is taking off Talk up the rematch! Talk up the rematch!”
The traveling show of 1981 provided another chapter for Clinton’s Close Calls in Cars. He and Randy White were in Fayetteville one morning for a commencement ceremony. As usual, Clinton chatted at length after the program, so that by the time he and White got back in the T-bird they were late for the next appointment, a graduation speech at the small town of Fifty-Six in north-central Arkansas. White’s best-case scenario was that they could make it fifty minutes late. “Let’s do it!” Clinton said. They took off, laughing and telling stories. Beer cans from a six-pack White had emptied the night before were rattling around on the floor of the car. The speedometer soon reached one hundred. Clinton was into a nap. White looked out the side and noticed that he had whooshed past a parked state trooper. He hit Clinton on the leg and said, “Uh, guess what, I just passed a state trooper!”
By the time the trooper caught up to them, Clinton and White were standing casually outside their car, parked on the shoulder of the road. “The trooper got that ‘Oh, shit’ expression on his face when he saw who it was,” White later recalled. Clinton coolly gave him instructions. “We’re trying to get to Fifty-Six and we need you to radio ahead and let them know we’ll be late.” Then they jumped back in the car and took off. Perhaps the trooper had forgotten that Clinton was no longer governor. In any case, not only did he spare them a ticket, but he radioed ahead as ordered. By the time the Thunderbird reached the school at Fifty-Six, the whole town was waiting. A special parking place had been set aside right in front. White’s engine was smoking. Clinton was pumped by the journey and the crowd. He jumped out of the car—and a few beer cans fell out with him and rolled and clanged down the hill. They loved him in Fifty-Six.
Now that Clinton needed friends wherever he could find them, his on-and-off relationship with labor was on again. He visited with Bill Becker and other state labor leaders several times, expressing regret that he had not worked more closely with them in the past. The AFL-CIO summer convention in Hot Springs received his denunciation of Frank White’s anti-labor record with shouts and several standing ovations, and Becker followed his speech by saying, “I suspect that that goodbye is only temporary.” The labor movement contributed money to the fund that paid Betsey Wright’s salary and his exploratory campaign work. The Democratic National Committee also helped him stay active by giving him a part-time mission as the head of the state and local elections effort, a job that could pay for some of his travel until he officially began his own state election campaign.
In his travels for the DNC, Clinton brought with him the lessons learned from his loss. The main tactical lesson, he thought, concerned how to respond to negative advertising. Since his first campaign on behalf of Judge Frank Holt in the 1966 gubernatorial primary, Clinton had remembered Holt’s assertion that the public expected more of its candidates than to respond in kind to mudslinging from the other side. After what Frank White did to him with the Cuban refugee ads, Clinton finally became convinced that Judge Holt’s credo was noble but naive and ultimately fatal. At a DNC election workshop in Des Moines, Iowa, Clinton delineated his new policy. “When someone is beating you over the head with a hammer, don’t sit there and take it,” he said. “Take out a meat cleaver and cut off their hand.”
Doug Wallace was in the luncheon audience that day when Clinton let loose. In the years that he had worked with Clinton, first as his press secretary in the 1974 congressional race and later as executive director of the Arkansas Democratic party, Wallace had heard many colorful comments from his friend, but none quite so ferocious and bloody as that. Yes, Clinton was eager to please; yes, he was known as a conciliator; no, he had no combat experience; no, he had never shown much skill with tools or cutlery; no, he was not the brutish sort; yes, he often seemed conflict averse—and yet he had a peculiar attraction to violent figures of speech. “Take out a meat cleaver and cut off their hand,” Bill Clinton had said.
One evening later that year, when Clinton took his traveling show up to Bentonville in northwest Arkansas, Rudy Moore felt as though it was his hand and those of other former assistants that Clinton’s meat cleaver was cutting off. Moore had gone to a reception for Clinton at a private home. During a question and answer period, a local banker got up and started criticizing Steve Smith and other members of Clinton’s first-term staff. It did not surprise Moore that Clinton chose not to defend Smith. But Moore was disappointed to hear Clinton give a long answer about the mistakes of his first term in which it seemed that he placed most of the blame on the staff. Moore left the reception feeling that “the rug had been pulled out from under” him. He had done nothing but work hard and be loyal, he thought to himself. He had given up his life in Springdale for a few years to devote himself to Clinton, and now “all of a sudden I’m getting the feeling that for his own well-being the staff becomes expendable at this point.”
Moore later wrote Clinton a letter questioning whether he had sacrificed his old staff to the political gods in his bid for redemption. In his reply, Clinton argued, “Whatever you may think, I consistently defended you and your role on my staff in private meetings all over the state…. I always acknowledged that we had some serious staff problems but I tried to take full responsibility for them.”
He had been misinterpreted, Clinton claimed.
Late that summer, national political columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover wrote in their column that Clinton had hired Betsey Wright to help him lay the groundwork for his 1982 campaign for governor. Wrong, Clinton responded, when local reporters asked him about the column. His actions were being misinterpreted. Germond and Witcover had “made too many assumptions.” Although Wright was working for him at a desk out-side his law office, “her job was not politically related.” She was just helping him establish a computer filing system for his gubernatorial papers. “There is no campaign,” he said.
FOR a few days each month, Dick Morris had been commuting to Little Rock from New York to help plot Clinton’s comeback. It did not start out as a pleasant task. He felt some competition with Betsey Wright, who was there doing the same thing. On first sight, they hated each other. Wright viewed Morris as a slick, negative eastern sharpie who was “trying to take this moral man and corrupt him in the evil ways of politics.” Morris viewed Wright as a “rigid left-wing ideologue who was so obsessively opposed to modern political campaigning that she would lead him back into the Stone Age politically.” Each saw the other as a mortal threat. But the animosity dissipated, until finally Wright and Morris found themselves agreeing on almost every political move. They became allies in the resurrection of Bill Clinton. Wright would compliment Morris by calling him “one of the smartest little sons of bitches” she had ever met. “Mean. But God was he good.”
Early in the fall of 1981, Morris polled Arkansas voters to gauge their feelings about Clinton. He feared that the public regarded Clinton as an alien figure, trained at Yale and Oxford, who had patronized them and had no sense of their state, and that they would feel no remorse about having got rid of him. But the poll results showed that the voters had a paternal attitude toward Clinton. Frank White had not won the election so much as Clinton had lost it. Morris and Wright began to construct a family parable out of the poll results. The citizens of Arkansas viewed Clinton as a prodigal son who had grown too big for his britches, who had thought that he knew everything and had tried to tell the other family members what was best for them rather than listening to their suggestions. They had voted against him to teach him a lesson, to give him a public spanking, but they had not necessarily intended for him to lose. The parable allowed for forgiveness. It meant, Wright concluded, that “a comeback was doable.”
But first Clinton had to apologize. Morris conceived the notion of a public mea culpa, a television advertisement in which Clinton announced his comeback bid by saying he was sorry. In discussing it with Wright, Clinton, and Rodham, Morris, who was Jewish, put it in terms of the theological metaphor of Christian forgiveness. “You have to recognize your sins, confess to them, and promise to sin no more and then sin no more,” Morris said. “And in the act of contrition, you have to be humble. You can’t be self-justified. You have to say, ‘I’m very sorry, ashamed, I know I did wrong and I’ll never do it again.ߣ” Rodham and Wright immediately took to the idea. Clinton had somewhat of a hard time fully accepting it. He felt humbled, certainly, and stupid for losing to Frank White, but the part he could not get past was being restrained from trying to explain and justify what he had done. On one level, he would say, “I screwed up.” But on another level he would ask, “Which of the things that I did would I do differently? Would I not fulfill my campaign promise to build better roads?” He could justify every specific action he had taken.
It was bigger than specifics, Morris insisted. It was his attitude, his approach to governing. The voters thought he was patronizing. He had to learn how to sail into the wind, Morris said. “You don’t abandon where you want to go, but you have to tack to get there. You have to one minute go right for the objective, and then at some point when you find the boat is about to tip over, you steer in another direction until the boat regains stability, then once more head toward the objective. You approach it in a series of triangular moves, instead of head-on.” The objective here was to get back in office. The triangular move was to apologize in a paid public television advertisement.
Clinton agreed to go ahead with the mea culpa, but continued to argue with Morris about the wording. The language was too apologetic, he complained.
“Well,” Morris responded, according to his later recollection, “you can’t say, ‘So I robbed the store but I needed the money badly because my sister is starving.’ That’s a very nice justification for robbing the store, but it implies that you don’t think it was all wrong to rob the store.”
“But I don’t!” Clinton said.
“But you do!” Morris said.
At one point, the two men spent several hours arguing over whether the word “apology” should be in the ad. They finally agreed to the language for two spots, one a general apology for mistakes including the car tags increase, and another addressing his decision during the final days of his term to pardon scores of violent criminals whose release had been recommended by the state parole board. They went to New York, to the West 57th Street studios of media consultant Tony Schwartz, for the filming. Before the cameras went on, Clinton revealed to Morris that he had fiddled with the words one last time. Morris was in shock. “I’m not gonna tell you what I did—I just want you to see it,” Clinton said.
In the end, Clinton managed to say he that he was sorry without saying he was sorry. He did it by using down-home Arkansas language. Morris was elated by the change. When he was growing up, Clinton said, his daddy never had to whip him twice for the same thing. If the voters gave him another chance, he said, he would never make the same mistakes again. He had learned that he could not lead without listening.
The ads began running on three Little Rock television stations on February 8, 1982. Clinton’s face filled the screen, barely leaving room for his name and the tag line identifying the commercial as paid for by the Clinton for Governor Committee. What the public saw was that Clinton was chastened. Political observers in Little Rock had never seen anything like it—someone announcing for governor via a thirty-second commercial, and doing so with an apology. But the strategy was apparent: By admitting his mistakes and seeking absolution before the first tough question of the race could be asked, Clinton was able to say that criticisms of his previous actions were irrelevant.
ANOTHER problem needed fixing as the comeback campaign began, this one involving Hillary Rodham and her name. Since his first race for governor in 1978, Clinton’s opponents had tried to make something out of that. It was very un-Arkansan, they would imply, marking Rodham as an outsider who stubbornly resisted the traditional mores of her adopted state. This sentiment was shared by many of Clinton’s friends, including his own mother. During the 1980 campaign, one powerful member of the Arkansas House offered the opinion to Representative Ray Smith, Jr., of Hot Springs that “Hillary’s gonna have to change her name, and shave her legs.” Rodham had ignored the issue in the past, but now, as she saw her and her husband’s political ambitions on the line, she reconsidered.
Her change, in typical Rodham fashion, was more intellectual than emotional. When Carolyn Staley dropped by the Midland Avenue house the morning after a party in Little Rock, Rodham asked her a question that Staley had never heard from her before: “What were people wearing?” It was clear to Staley that Rodham was “making the transformation from studied feminist. She started to key in on the fact that the name was political, that what she wore was political.” Years later, when asked about the name change, Clinton recalled a conversation he had with his wife in which she approached him and said, “We’ve got to talk about this name deal.” As Clinton remembered it, Rodham told him that she did not want him to lose the election because of her last name. Clinton said he protested. Then, by his account, she placed the decision in the most pragmatic political terms: “We shouldn’t run the risk. What if it’s one percent of the vote? What if it’s two percent?”
If Clinton protested, it was not very strenuously. In conversations when his wife was not around, he often joked about their different names in a way that made it clear he thought it would be easier if she became Hillary Clinton. Once, while eating Mexican food with some old friends from the McGovern campaign during a visit to Austin, Clinton noted that he and his wife disagreed on an issue and then added, “Hell, I can’t even get her to use my last name!”
All that changed on February 27, 1982, the day of Clinton’s formal announcement, when Hillary referred to herself as “Mrs. Bill Clinton.” Was it really a change, and was it something that she wanted to do? Her answers that day left room for confusion. “I don’t have to change my name,” she said. “I’ve been Mrs. Bill Clinton. I kept the professional name Hillary Rodham in my law practice, but now I’m going to be taking a leave of absence from the law firm to campaign full-time for Bill and I’ll be Mrs. Bill Clinton. I suspect people will be getting tired of hearing from Mrs. Bill Clinton.” But when asked whether she had legally changed her name and was now registered to vote as Hillary Clinton, she said, “No.” The press accounts of that exchange made it clear that she still had some convincing to do.
The Times-News of McGehee put it this way: “‘No,’ came the ice cold answer from Arkansas’ former first lady.”
THE public reaction to Clinton’s mea culpa ad was swift and sure. People hated it. In a three-way race in the Democratic primary for governor against Jim Guy Tucker and Joe Purcell, Clinton fell from the top spot, from holding about 43 percent of the vote, down to the mid-20s. Voters who said they held a favorable view of Clinton dropped. The number who held an unfavorable view doubled. Tucker, the politician he had conspired to defeat in the 1978 Senate race against David Pryor, was now ahead of him. And all because of a self-inflicted wound. Morris’s polls showed that the mea culpa caused the precipitous decline in Clinton’s ratings, reminding voters of the reasons they turned away from him in the first place. The consultant flew out to Arkansas to deliver the grim news, and met Clinton and Rodham in a small town where Clinton was giving a speech. He tried to put the best spin on the poll results. The apology was like a smallpox vaccination, he said. You get a little sick, but then you are immune. He said it, Morris recalled later, with “great bravado and self-confidence.” But he did not mean it. He thought he had destroyed his client.
The immunization theory was quickly tested. It was a bitter, unenlightening primary, with most of the enmity flowing between Tucker and Clinton, who were both in desperate, anything-goes moods, fighting for political survival. They attacked each other daily, each trying to prove that he was tougher and more conservative. Tucker attacked Clinton for commuting or cutting the sentences of thirty-eight convicted murderers during the final weeks of his first term. Clinton attacked Tucker’s poor attendance record in Congress and portrayed Tucker as a tool of labor and the special interests and as a bleeding heart on welfare issues. He criticized Tucker for supporting liberal food stamp standards. It was left to the Arkansas Gazette to point out that Tucker had merely voted against an amendment that would have eliminated food stamps for striking workers. In an editorial entitled “Bill Clinton on the Low Road,” the Gazette concluded of his food stamp attack: “It is an uncharacteristic place for Bill Clinton to take his stand, and in the sanctity of his own thoughts he must be ashamed.”
Shame was not foremost on Clinton’s mind that year. His main concern was to stay alive. The intensity of his mood was revealed in April when he got into a dispute with the Arkansas Education Association (AEA). At a meeting with a screening committee for the teachers’ union, Clinton was asked what kind of relationship he would maintain with the AEA if they did not endorse him. According to Larry Russell, a teacher at Lake Hamilton High who was chairman of the committee, Clinton “said he would tear our heads off and beat our brains out if we endorsed another candidate.” Russell and Lyle French, the president of the union, took Clinton’s statement to mean that he might hold a grudge against them.
“Nothing could be further from the truth and I resent this!” Clinton bellowed during a rally in Hot Springs a few days later. In Clinton’s version of the event, when the screening committee asked him how he would respond if he failed to get their endorsement, “I told them this is a political race and they would be trying to end my political career and that I would beat their brains out.” But, Clinton said, he left no implication that he would hold it against them. The teachers endorsed Tucker.
But Clinton’s negative approach was working. The next round of internal polls found that all of Clinton’s negative attacks on Tucker scored, driving his poll ratings down fifteen points, while none of Tucker’s attacks hurt Clinton. It seemed that Clinton had indeed been immunized. “The polls showed a tremendous backlash of sympathy for Clinton because he had already apologized,” Morris recalled. “People said, ‘What’s Tucker dumping on him for? He already apologized. It’s a rare man who can admit his mistakes.’ The immunity was so palpably there that it was a tremendously useful thing to have gone through.” Clinton and Rodham filed it away in their briefcase of effective political tactics, to be pulled out now and again when Clinton got caught in uncomfortable situations. The calculated act of contrition: when in trouble, go directly to the people and confess on your own terms.
As often happens when two candidates bury each other in mud during a three-way primary, the voters became interested in the third candidate. Joe Purcell, a soft-spoken former lieutenant governor, made it into a runoff with Clinton, while Tucker was eliminated. Clinton and his strategists would have preferred to have faced Tucker again. “Tucker had a record we could run against,” Betsey Wright said later. “Joe Purcell was a lovable old slipper. We didn’t know what to do with him.” Purcell was in the Judge Holt mold, a dignified man who refused to make personal attacks against his opponents. Clinton could not claim that someone was going at him with a hammer, but he was forced to use the meat cleaver anyway. Morris’s first poll during the two-week runoff showed Purcell ahead, with most of the Tucker vote going to him. They put up one negative ad and spread the word that Republicans were interfering in the runoff on Purcell’s behalf. Luckily for Clinton, runoffs, with traditionally low voter turnouts, depend largely on campaign organizations, and Purcell did not have one. The results on June 8 gave Clinton 54 percent of the vote. “We want Frank! We want Frank!” Clinton’s supporters shouted that night. They got Frank. The rematch with Governor White was at hand.
THE general election of 1982 was almost completely devoid of the internal bickering of many other Clinton campaigns. It combined the optimism and freshness of his 1974 congressional campaign with the technical skill of his later efforts. With Hillary, Betsey Wright, and Dick Morris at the head of the campaign organization, there were enough decisive people to offset Clinton’s indecisiveness, which was less noticeable than usual anyway because of the urgency of his cause. He had a clear mission: redemption.
“Hell, he knew what was at stake,” Woody Bassett, who organized Washington County for him, later recalled. “He knew that if he lost, it was the end for him in elected politics.”
His supporters had various missions of their own. Some hated Frank White. Some thought Clinton deserved another chance and felt guilty that they had not worked harder for him in 1980. Some were embarrassed that the state had regained a backwater image with the enactment of fundamentalist legislation requiring public schools to teach creationism along with evolution. Young black professionals who moved back to the state at the start of the 1980s saw Clinton as the conduit for their rise. The vibrancy of a political campaign can be measured by the ratio of volunteers to paid staffers. In 1980, Clinton struggled to find volunteers. This time, the headquarters overflowed with volunteers and there were only a handful of paid staff members. Betsey Wright called it a crusade—her first, and her best—in Arkansas. If the volunteers were the soul of the campaign, the computer system was its brain. The dedicated computer room in the campaign headquarters near the Capitol ran around the clock, churning out Glad-to-Meet-You letters, fund-raising solicitations, special letters for black supporters, for first-time supporters, for teachers, for the elderly. Letters to friends of Bill went out in an endless stream. No other politician in Arkansas had anything comparable. The computer became the mechanical extension of Clinton’s tireless personality. What else. What else. What else.
The airwaves were glutted with negative advertising from both sides, but White’s ads made little difference. With every exchange of the hammer versus the meat cleaver, Clinton’s numbers rose. “It got to be almost a joke,” Morris recalled. “We felt like we were behind bulletproof glass watching somebody aim at us and pull the trigger and watch the bullets splatter harmlessly.” He started to call Clinton “Achilles without the heel.”
Clinton narrowed his message. He talked constantly about jobs and utility rates. He had needed a villain against which he could assume a populist pose, and a calculated decision was made to cast the utility companies in that role. Other villains were considered, according to Morris, including the trucking-poultry lobby, but Clinton did not want to refight a lost battle of the first term and in fact had promised to support the industry’s bid for an increase in truck weights to 80,000 pounds. Utility companies were better villains in the sense that they were less feisty and threatening. He promised that in a second term he would work to make the Public Service Commission, which controlled utility rates, an elected body accountable to the people. He brought in old-line, middle-of-the-road Democrats to help him raise money, including W. Maurice Smith, a wealthy farmer and banker from Birdeye, and George Kell, a former third baseman for the Detroit Tigers. He raised and spent more money than any candidate in Arkansas history. He spent most of his Sundays in black churches, and recruited three black organizers to help him with the black vote: Rodney Slater, Carol Willis, and Bob Nash, all of whom would become part of his team for the next decade.
Willis, a former law student of Clinton’s in Fayetteville, had developed a militant reputation in the impoverished Delta region of southeast Arkansas. He called Clinton one day and said, “They’re about ready to run me out of McGehee, Bill, I need work.” To which Clinton responded, “Well, shit, I ain’t got no jobs unless I get elected. Come on and help.” Willis, Slater, and Nash split up the state, Willis taking the Delta, Slater the Little Rock area, and Nash the southwest. They called themselves the three amigos: Willis the radical, Slater the moderate, and Nash the technocrat. “And we humped,” Willis recalled later. “We worked twenty-four hours a day, Saturday and Sunday. If there was an event involved black people, we were there. And we would get Clinton there.” No one in Arkansas political annals locked up the black vote the way Clinton did in 1982.
On election night, everything was different from the way it had been in 1980. Rodham and Clinton and Betsey Wright were superstitious. They stayed away from the Camelot Hotel. They set up a stage on the street outside the headquarters on Central Avenue. Clinton watched the results in a back room with Hillary and his mother and brother Roger, who was wearing an open-necked Mexican shirt and gold chains. Wright ran the tally board. She tried to stay cool, but could barely contain her excitement. Every few minutes, she emerged from the room and shouted out new numbers. “Craighead County by fifty-four percent. Complete!” she barked, denoting another county that Clinton had lost two years earlier but carried this time. Clinton had won. He pumped his clenched left fist high into the air and rushed out the front door of the headquarters, out into the street, where his army of supporters, intoxicated by victory, chanted his name as he disappeared in the delirious sea of outstretched hands.