RELATIONSHIPS
FOR MORE THAN a decade, since his return home from his long odyssey through Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale, Clinton had been preoccupied with the task of becoming. Only rarely was he jolted into periods of introspection during which he would consider why he was what he was. It had happened when his daughter was born, and again when he was defeated for governor. Now that question engulfed him once again. This time it began when a young man named Rodney Myers approached Arkansas State Police narcotics investigator Robert Gibbs and Hot Springs detective Travis Bunn in the spring of 1984 and told them that Roger Cassidy Clinton, the governor’s younger brother, was a cocaine dealer. The investigators heard Myers’s story, which meshed with other information they had been gathering during a state-federal narcotics probe of cocaine use in Arkansas. They took him to see Sergeant Larry Gleghorn, Gibbs’s supervisor at the criminal division, who set in motion a sting operation in which they would wire Myers with a hidden tape recorder and place a video camera in his apartment to record Roger Clinton selling cocaine.
The awkwardness in having the Arkansas State Police investigate the brother of the Arkansas governor was compounded by the fact that both Gibbs and Gleghorn knew the Clintons personally. Before transferring to the criminal division, they had been assigned to the state police security detail at the executive mansion, serving as bodyguards, chauffeurs, and at times valets for the governor and his family. Gleghorn had been friendly with the extended Clinton clan, including Roger and his mother Virginia, who was now married to her fourth husband, Richard Kelley, a food broker. During Gleghorn’s two-year stint at the mansion, Roger had been a frequent visitor and an occasional problem. The governor’s younger brother was a good-times fellow, gold-chained and open-collared, and though he detested the memory of his father and namesake, who died when he was eleven, he seemed to have taken on a measure of the old man’s personality: the gregarious and unreliable “dude,” surviving on guile and charm. He had partied and performed with his rock band at after-hours clubs in Little Rock that stayed open until dawn. More than once, according to Gleghorn, Governor Clinton had asked a member of the security detail “to kind of go and keep an eye on that situation.” Now the eye was a surveillance camera.
One day soon after the investigation began, a state police official alerted Clinton’s law enforcement aide, who told chief of staff Betsey Wright. Wright called the Rose Law Firm in search of Hillary, who had rejoined the firm after her service on the education task force, and found her eating lunch with friends at a restaurant on Kavanaugh Street. Wright and Hillary drove to the mansion and told the governor. According to Clinton’s later recollections, he was also informed of the investigation separately by State Police Colonel Tommy Goodwin. It was not, in any case, the most closely held secret. Nor was it normal procedure to advise the brother of a drug suspect that a sting operation was under way. Although Clinton had no authority over the matter, he wrote a note to Colonel Goodwin stating that he would not interfere in the investigation and that he expected it to be handled in routine fashion.
Clinton’s private reaction to the news was a mixture of guilt and dread. When he and Roger had lived in the same home on Scully Street, and even during the early years at Georgetown, he had included his little brother in many of his activities and had written and talked about him with parental love and concern. But then he “got so wrapped up in” his career, Clinton said later, that he paid less attention to his brother. Did the news that Roger was a cocaine dealer take him by surprise? Clinton said later that it did, and that he felt guilty about not being more involved during those years as Roger dropped out of college three times and bounced around with rock bands. But the fact that, even before the drug investigation began, Clinton occasionally had asked members of his security detail to watch out for Roger indicates that he had some suspicions. The heads-up from the state police, according to Betsey Wright, was “not the first time the possibility of his brother using cocaine had ever crossed his mind, yet it took him by surprise. Suspecting is not mutually exclusive from being taken by surprise. You hope against hope.”
Part of Clinton’s dread came from the realization that he had to keep quiet about what he had learned. The painful prospect of allowing his brother to be stung, arrested, and sentenced to prison was balanced against the politically damaging repercussions of interfering in an official investigation. The surveillance dragged on for weeks. With Officer Gibbs hiding under a blanket in the back seat of the car, informant Myers drove out to Roger’s apartment and emerged with cocaine and a secret tape-recording of the transaction. Four more deals were made and recorded, as investigators gathered evidence on Roger and a cocaine scene that involved a Colombian national supplier operating between Arkansas and New York and a circle of cocaine users in Hot Springs and Little Rock that included wealthy young lawyers and bond brokers. Roger was heard boasting about how untouchable he was, how nobody would mess with the brother of the governor.
During that period, Clinton talked to both Roger and his mother several times without mentioning the investigation. Alone with Hillary or Betsey Wright, he would ask, “Do you think they are ever going to finish this?” Finally, the investigators confronted Roger and told him they were charging him with distribution of cocaine. According to Gibbs, Roger tried to deny that he had done anything wrong until he was made aware of the recordings and videotapes. Bill Clinton’s sadness at the fall of his brother was tempered by relief that the period of uncertainty was over. He held a press conference in Little Rock that afternoon and then drove down to Hot Springs for a family meeting with his mother and Roger. It was an emotional scene, as later described by Virginia, who said that Roger had arrived in tears, threatening to kill himself because of the embarrassment and pain he was bringing to his devoted mother and famous brother. “I caused it! I can end it!” he sobbed. The suicide talk enraged Bill, who shouted, “How dare you think that way!”, leaped up from his chair, and started shaking Roger furiously.
For Clinton, a period of intense introspection began soon after his brother’s arrest, when Roger entered therapy for his drug addiction. The counselor, Karen Ballard, requested that Bill and Virginia join the sessions. For the first time, the mother and two sons talked openly about alcoholism and the effects it had had on their family. It came out that Virginia had developed a tendency to avoid unpleasant truths and block out difficult parts of her life. Just as she had once been reluctant to acknowledge that her angry and skeptical mother might have been right about the failings of Roger the husband, it was hard for her to accept now that Roger the son had a chemical addiction of his own. Virginia had faced so many obstacles in her life that she had taught herself to create her own version of reality and function within it, allowing her to maintain her optimism and to persevere. Bill discovered that he had the same characteristics, including the denial mechanism, he told friends. It had always been easier for him to discuss the premature death of his biological father, and how that pushed him to achieve at an early age, than to consider how he was shaped by his stepfather’s alcoholism, which he had never mentioned to most of his closest friends. In the sessions with his brother and mother, Clinton said later, “We learned a lot about how you do a lot of damage to yourself if you’re living with an alcoholic and you just sort of deny that behavior and deflect it all. You pay a big price for that.”
For several weeks, Clinton delved into the literature of alcoholism and co-dependence, the emerging fashionable theory, which placed addiction in the realm of family relationships. According to Betsey Wright, Clinton often came back to the office talking about the latest book he had read and relating it to his own experience. It was the first time she had heard him talk about alcoholism in his home, and how it had made him so averse to conflict. “He did a lot of introspection that I had never seen him do like that before,” Wright recalled. “He got a much better understanding of why he did things the way he did. It was in the context of learning about how that comes out of an alcoholic home. Most notable was why he was always trying to please people. He was fascinated by it, and it rang so true that it was kind of like he was being introduced to something that he wished he had known a long time ago.” This did not mean that Clinton changed his behavior, Wright thought, but simply that he could “see what he was doing far better.”
In a discussion with Carolyn Yeldell Staley, Clinton indicated that he was struggling with his self-awareness. “I think we’re all addicted to something,” Clinton told her, according to Staley’s recollections. “Some people are addicted to drugs. Some to power. Some to food. Some to sex. We’re all addicted to something.” It seemed to Staley that Clinton was “coming to grips with the fact that he had places of real weakness. He was trying to sort all of that out in his life.”
Clinton, Virginia, and Hillary Clinton all sat in the federal courtroom on the day in January 1985 when Roger was sentenced to a two-year prison term at the federal correctional institution in Fort Worth, Texas. As part of his plea, Roger agreed to testify, with immunity, for the government in several other cocaine cases. One resulted in the conviction of his childhood friend, Sam Anderson, Jr., a limousine-riding Hot Springs attorney. Another led to a six-month prison term for investment banker Dan R. Lasater, a flashy young financier, racehorse owner, and recreational cocaine user who set out lines of the white powder at his lavish parties.
The connections between Lasater and the Clintons throughout the decade raised questions about the propriety of the relationship. Roger, who had been one of Lasater’s cocaine suppliers, had worked briefly for him at one of his horse farms and as his driver, and had borrowed $8,000 from him to pay off a drug debt. At the same time, Lasater was a major contributor to Clinton’s permanent campaign, donating money to his gubernatorial races and holding fundraisers. His brokerage house, meanwhile, received $1.6 million in fees for its role in handling tax-exempt bonds for the state. Clinton personally lobbied the legislature in 1985 to give Lasater’s firm a contract to sell bonds for a state police radio system. The governor and his wife occasionally flew on Lasater’s corporate jet. When Lasater was promoting a special vacation package at Angel Fire, his 22,000-acre ski resort in New Mexico, he used Governor Clinton’s name in his mailings, although Clinton did not make the trip. Patsy Thomasson, the executive vice president of Lasater Inc., was a Democratic party activist who had been appointed to the state highway commission by Clinton, her long-time friend. After serving time in prison, Lasater was later pardoned by Clinton.
The prosecution of Roger Clinton did have some positive side effects. Asa Hutchinson, then the Republican federal prosecutor in Little Rock, believed that Roger’s conviction and his later testimony in other cases helped stem an emerging cocaine party scene in central Arkansas. “Here the brother of the governor was saying, ‘Hey, nobody touches me, look who I am!’ And people had come to think it was all right,” Hutchinson recalled. “The case was important in showing people they couldn’t do that.” It was also important, Bill Clinton came to believe, in saving his brother’s life.
“WE’RE closer than any brothers you’ve ever known,” Roger Clinton was heard saying about his relationship with his brother the governor during one of the secretly tape-recorded conversations with Rodney Myers. “See, I didn’t have a father growing up and he was like a father to me growing up, all my life, so that’s why we’ve always been so close. There isn’t anything in the world he wouldn’t do for me.”
Minutes before he described that brotherly bond, twenty-eight-year-old Roger had inhaled cocaine through his nose. He and Myers were in the middle of a rambling discussion during which they rated the quality of their cocaine (Myers: “Boy, this is some good coke!” Clinton: “It’s decent. It’s decent”) … and discussed the high-rolling lives of wealthy lawyer friends who rode in white limousines and partied in hot tubs … and told tall tales about busting heads in a Fayetteville brawl … and fantasized about how they were going to make so much money in condominium deals that they could have generous clothing allowances and new cars (Clinton: “What I’ve been saving up for is a Porsche.” Myers: “What kind?” Clinton: “Just any kind. Just any kind.” Myers: “Right. You want a Porsche?” Clinton: “I want a Porsche so bad I can spit” ) … and agreed that Roger’s name would help them put the deals together (Myers: “If I had you on my side, I could make a hell of a lot of money, you know, with your last name.” Clinton: “Oh, listen, I realize exactly what you’re saying.” Myers: “You got good bullshit. You got your bullshit but your last name would also make, you know, you could make a hell of a lot.” Clinton: “Good at bullshitting and public relations. I can sell a product.”).
Roger Clinton would call Bill “Big Brother” when talking about him to other people. Not “my big brother,” just “Big Brother,” with the double meaning explicit. They were of different generations, though separated only by ten years, each with soft blue eyes and big hands, raised by the same woman with the same unconditional love. When her boy Bill had left for good from Scully Street, Virginia had taken down his plaques and awards and rearranged the house to make it more accommodating as a rehearsal space for Roger’s first rock band, The Hundred Millimeter Banana, which he formed at age ten. She wanted him to become the next Elvis as much as she wanted Bill to become the next JFK. When he started to get club dates with another band, Dealer’s Choice, she went to see him perform, even at a topless lounge named the Black Orchid, and listened to him sing with the same pride with which she listened to her son the politician talk. She got a list of Roger’s club dates and studied it with the same pleasure that she perused Bill’s weekly schedule, sent to her by the governor’s office. She loved her sons with equal intensity, she told her friends. But one son had the will and one son did not.
How could two brothers be so different: the governor and the coke dealer, the Rhodes Scholar and the college dropout, one who tried to read three hundred books in three months and another who at his most addicted snorted cocaine sixteen times a day, one who could spend hours explaining economic theories and another whose economic interests centered on getting a new Porsche? In the case of the Clinton brothers, the contrasts become more understandable when considered within the context of their family history and environment. They grew up in a town of contrast and hypocrisy, in a family of duality and conflict. Bill and Roger were not so much opposites as two sides of the same coin. Each essentially grew up without a father. Bill was constantly searching for older male role models: his pappaw Eldridge Cassidy, Virgil Spurlin at school, his grandmother’s brother Buddy Grisham, his friend Jim Blair, his adviser Maurice Smith, his minister W. O. Vaught. Bill was the closest thing to a role model Roger could find.
By their chosen careers, Bill the politician and Roger the rock musician revealed a common desire to perform and to gain approval from large audiences. Virginia often said that her boys resembled her in that respect. Like her son Roger, she loved to jump on stage and sing along with the band; and like her son Bill, she would walk into a room and try to win over every person there. Another common denominator for the politician and the rock musician is sex. Performers in both realms are often surrounded by groupies, their sexual charisma enhanced by power and unrestrained ego. The desire to perform, the need for approval, and the supply of idolaters can be a habit-forming triangle.
There was little history of sexual restraint in Bill and Roger’s family culture, no puritanical sense that sexual propriety was the barometer of goodness and morality. Suspicion, gossip, and mystery were always part of the sexual mix. Edith Cassidy constantly accused her husband Eldridge Cassidy of cheating on her, while at the same time she developed a reputation for engaging in affairs with certain doctors in Hope. William Jefferson Blythe may have had five or more wives in his short life, wooing and discarding women with dispatch. Virginia married Roger Clinton even though she knew he was a philanderer. During their tumultuous marriage, Roger was often overcome by jealousy after catching Virginia flirting at nightclubs or hearing the gossip that she had been seen around town with other men. Bill Clinton came out of that environment, and took from it the competing impulses of a youth who had walked to church alone in a city of earthly pleasures. He was, at once, the good boy, the Family Hero, and the inveterate flatterer and flirt, constantly searching for more girls—and later, women—who would be charmed by him and feed his ego.
His marriage to Hillary Rodham in 1975 seemed to have little inhibiting effect on him. During the 1978 gubernatorial race, campaign manager Rudy Moore had to fire a travel aide who boasted publicly about the nightclubs he had visited with the candidate. Provocative women seemed to find their way to the governor’s office, “hangers-on who could get you in trouble,” as Moore described them. Clinton’s judgment at times was not as good as it should have been, Moore thought, though he believed that “appearances were more than what was going on.” Clinton’s travel aide during his first term, Randy White, said that the governor enjoyed nothing more than to go on the road, especially to Fayetteville, where he would frequent a club in the bottom of the old post office, and dance and hang out “until they threw us out.” Wherever they went, White said, Clinton’s table attracted a crowd of pretty women drawn to the powerful young governor, who enjoyed the attention. “He loved the road,” White said. “He loved it.”
In more than two years at Clinton’s side, White said later, he saw no evidence that the governor was having extramarital affairs and was not asked by Clinton to conceal his activities. In contrast, several state troopers who worked on the governor’s personal security staff after his return to power in 1983 claimed that Clinton was promiscuous and that he frequently used them to solicit sexual partners. Trooper L. D. Brown, who was on the security staff from 1983 to 1985, alleged that he was asked to try to solicit more than one hundred women for Clinton during those two years. On the matter of how many, if any, of those women acceded to Clinton’s desires, Brown was unclear. He called himself “the go-between, the buffer” for a politician with a voracious sexual appetite.
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HILLARY Rodham Clinton and Carolyn Yeldell Staley were on the back lawn of the Governor’s Mansion one summer day, sticking croquet hoops into the grass and talking about their husbands. Carolyn had married a soft-spoken photographer and art teacher named Jerry Staley, who remained in the background, content in his role as the dependable husband and father of two daughters and a son, willing to let his wife be the star of the family as the aspiring singer and longtime friend of the governor of Arkansas. Hillary said she could never marry someone as quiet as Jerry. She liked to spar, she said. She liked to “get into it.” She had to have an equal. Then, pondering the ups and downs of her life with Bill Clinton, she said, “I wonder how history is going to note our marriage.”
The long haul, the view toward the future and history, was evident in the Clinton and Rodham partnership from its formation. For Clinton, perpetually infatuated with a shining new idea or a fresh face, Hillary was the rare constant, her intellect, resilience, and ambition always there, equal to his. When he had thought about marrying her, it was not so much the sight of the young woman that overwhelmed him as an image of an older version: Hillary, he told friends, was the one woman with whom he could imagine growing old and not getting bored. Her feelings about him seemed more immediate and passionate; she adored him, one friend said, with “a romantic, fifteen-year-old, poetic, teenage love.” By the mid-1980s, those early dynamics were still apparent, although there had been several adjustments in the partnership, most of them made by Hillary. Year by year, in their joint political enterprise, she had taken on more tasks—some that her husband had asked her to do, some that she felt obliged to perform because it was clear to her that he did not want to do them or was not good at them. After ten years of marriage, those tasks were starting to define her.
One of Hillary’s missions was to protect her husband by being his gate-keeper. During her early years in Arkansas, she often deferred to Clinton’s judgments about people; but that had changed forever after his defeat in 1980, when she thought that he had been ill served by poor advice and by his own amiability and that she needed to take a more direct role in his career. After their return to the Governor’s Mansion, she would tell friends that she understood him better than anyone, better than his sycophants or critics, and that it was her responsibility to allow him to be his true self. One way to do that was to prevent other people from imposing on him if they seemed against his best interests. She said that she wanted him to be free to use his own mind, which she considered creative and even visionary. Although she was naturally skeptical and direct, even hard-edged in her dealings, Hillary’s role as her husband’s protector exaggerated those character traits. Her concerns were largely political, though at times there seemed to be a sexual component to her protectiveness. A male friend of Clinton’s noticed that Hillary was classifying the people around Bill as either “one of the goods or one of the bads. If you were bad, you had to be kept away from Bill, because if he was with the bad guys he would relax and enjoy himself and make comments about attractive women waving at him in the crowd.”
In her effort to protect Clinton, Hillary was assisted by two women whom she did not consider threats: press secretary Joan Roberts, who insisted on being in attendance whenever Clinton or another member of the staff spoke to the press; and chief of staff Betsey Wright, whose relationship with Clinton resembled that of a bossy big sister. Wright was constantly checking on his whereabouts, sending out scouts to see what he was doing and what his enemies were saying about him, thinking up explanations to put his actions in the best possible light, and trying to keep him away from people she thought wanted to exploit him. These three strong women around Clinton became known in Little Rock as “the Valkyries,” named for the wise and immortal maidens of Old Norse mythology who selected the heroic warriors fit to die in battle and be escorted to Valhalla.
Clinton both encouraged the defensive cordon put up around him and bristled at the way it inhibited him. “I won’t have it! I won’t have it!” he once shouted at Wright when she insisted that a state policeman escort him on his morning jogs. The almost sibling nature of Wright’s relationship with Clinton at times stretched the boundaries of boss and chief of staff. His habits began to grate on her, and hers on him. Once when he was noisily chomping on an ice cube, his mouth impolitely open, and reached into his cup to get another cube, Wright swatted it out of his hand, which caused him to slap her, reflexively, like a brother hitting his sister. It was only a tap, and it was the only time he struck her, but it was by no means their only fight. She was the aide on whom he vented his frustrations. He staged so many temper tantrums in front of her that he would send her earplugs as an expression of apology. His quarrels with Hillary were even louder and more frequent. But as Hillary told Carolyn Staley that day when they were setting up for croquet on the back lawn, she liked to spar. Mansion workers confided to frequent guests that there were times when they would have loved to disappear while the Clintons screamed at each other.
Another continuing task for Hillary was that of moneymaker. It had been apparent since the beginning of their partnership that Clinton cared little about money outside the political campaign context, and that she would carry the financial burden for the family. But as they entered the prime wage-earning years of middle age, the arrangement became lopsided. Clinton’s part of the deal was to be governor and make a national name for himself while bringing home $35,000 a year in salary. Hillary felt the need to build the family savings account at the same time that she was taking on more political assignments that consumed hours she could have been billing law clients. Her dealings in the cattle futures commodities market with Jim Blair in the late 1970s marked the first of several forays into the financial world.
Roy Drew, then a stock broker at E. F. Hutton in Little Rock, had received a call from Hillary in the spring of 1983, just as she was getting into her work on the Education Standards Committee. She told Drew that she and two of her partners at Rose Law, Vince Foster, Jr., and Webster Hubbell, had $15,000 each that they wanted him to invest. They called their account Midlife Investors. Foster and Hubbell were placid partners while Hillary was constantly checking in with Drew. “I recommended Diamond Shamrock and a movie deal and Firestone,” Drew recalled. “And Hillary would call and say, ‘What’s Firestone doing?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, it’s up an eighth today,’ and she’d say, ‘Why isn’t it doing anything?’ She was used to the fast action of cattle futures. The next day she’d call and say, ‘Where’s Firestone?’ and I’d say, ‘Down a half,’ and she’d say, ‘Oh, no, what’s the matter?’ She’d call three or four times a week.”
Some people sensed a growing resentment in Hillary that she had to take on so many private duties in the partnership while at the same time she was being asked, unfairly, she thought, to sacrifice material things. In 1985, Hillary told consultant Dick Morris that she wanted to build a swimming pool on the mansion grounds. She said among other things it would be great for Chelsea. “I said, ‘How could you even think of that? You’ll get killed for that!’ ” Morris recalled. “And she said, ‘Well, it’s really not for us, the mansion is for all future governors of the state and they’ll all be able to use it.’ And I said, ‘You’ll never be able to sell that argument. The next time you fly over Little Rock, look down and count the number of swimming pools you see.’ She said, ‘Well, a lot of people have swimming pools.ߣ I got really sarcastic with her and said, ‘On the next poll, do you want me to ask whether people have swimming pools?’ She was really mad. Very angry. She said, ‘Why can’t we lead the lives of normal people?’ I saw in that flash the resentment from a lot of those issues, the sacrifices they were making staying in public life.” Clinton, for his part, lamented to friends that he held a job with little income, one where it was politically impractical to seek a raise. He said he felt bad that he was not living up to his responsibility to support the family. But politics was still his only track.
Another role that Hillary assumed was related to the first two—protector and financial guarantor. She was her husband’s public relations troubleshooter and legal problem solver. She provided a full range of formal and informal services. As the public relations consultant, she would devote hours to courting John Robert Starr, the managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat, in an occasionally effective effort to persuade him to go easier on her husband. As the lawyer, she would quietly represent Clinton’s interests, working to resolve some of the most politically sensitive issues in Arkansas, including the resolution of the long-running desegregation case in the Little Rock school district and the state’s financial dispute over its disengagement from the costly Grand Gulf nuclear power plant near Port Gibson, Mississippi.
The Grand Gulf case provoked questions, even from Clinton allies, about potential conflicts of interest involving the governor’s wife’s law firm and state issues. Dick Morris said that when he told his wife Eileen McGann, who was also a lawyer, that Rose Law was representing the Public Service Commission in the Grand Gulf matter, McGann thought it looked like a conflict and said of Hillary, “She’s got to be out of her mind!” On his next visit to Little Rock, according to Morris, he raised the issue with Clinton, who said that he needed Hillary and the Rose firm on the case because “anybody else would mangle it.” Morris said that Hillary reacted angrily when he asked her about it, reminding him that Rose was a respected firm which had been doing business with the state long before she came along. Her solution was to dissociate herself from fees Rose Law received in the case.
During the 1986 gubernatorial race, in which Clinton prevailed over Frank White in a bitter rematch, White raised the conflict of interest question regarding Hillary and Grand Gulf. In response, Rose Law issued a statement saying that fees from the case “were segregated from other income and were distributed to members of the firm other than Mrs. Clinton so that she in fact received no direct or indirect benefit from the fees.” The question was framed in financial terms, disregarding the larger notion of Hillary Clinton as the private lawyer watching out for her husband’s political interests. The Clinton team’s political response to White was to belittle him for picking on the governor’s wife. They printed bumper stickers and put up billboards with the message: “Frank White for First Lady.” It was another tactic, like the mea culpa commercial of 1982, that worked so well that the Clintons stored it away for future use.
There were other potential conflicts involving Hillary’s work as a Rose lawyer and institutions with political or personal connections to her and her husband the governor. In one case, Dan Lasater, the bond broker and major Clinton campaign contributor who had gone to jail on a drug conviction, was sued for fraud in the collapse of a savings and loan in Illinois. Hillary, representing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, helped arrange an out-of-court settlement for less than one-tenth of what the government originally sought. In another, she helped represent Jim McDougal when the thrift he owned, Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, sought permission from the state securities commissioner to raise money by issuing preferred stock in an effort to maintain the minimum capital requirements and avert insolvency. The Madison case underscored the professional, personal, and political triangle of interests in the Clintons’ lives during that era.
At one point of the triangle was Hillary’s corner office on the third floor of the red brick Rose Law building, a handsomely converted downtown YWCA with hardwood floors and an indoor swimming pool. It was from that office that she signed a letter to the securities commissioner on behalf of McDougal and received a “Dear Hillary” letter in reply. It would later be a question of dispute as to how Hillary became McDougal’s lawyer in that matter. According to her account, she was merely helping a young Rose associate who did most of the work. According to McDougal and his wife Susan, Hillary actively solicited the savings and loan’s business, showing up at Madison’s Art Deco-style Little Rock branch office one day and saying she needed new clients and would like the thrift to put her and Rose on retainer. “Hillary came in and was telling us about the problem; the problem was finances and she was not bringing enough in to her law firm,” Susan McDougal later said. “I remember Jim laughing and saying, ‘Well, one lawyer’s as good as another, we might as well help Hillary.’ ”
At the second point of the triangle was the Georgian-style Governor’s Mansion several blocks south of downtown where Bill and Hillary Clinton kept their personal papers related to their private financial relationship with the McDougals in Whitewater Development Company. The land development enterprise along the White River had never made the money McDougal had promised it would, and now, by the mid-1980s, it apparently had cost the Clintons tens of thousands of dollars in interest payments on the original loans they had taken with the McDougals to buy the property. McDougal was feeling regret that he had lured the Clintons into the deal. It was, he said, “the dumbest thing I had ever done in my life, from start to finish.”
The final point in the triangle was the governor’s office on the second floor of the Capitol. It was from that office that Clinton, as governor, appointed the securities commissioner who regulated McDougal’s savings and loan. And it was also from that office that Clinton, the politician, operated his permanent campaign, which included the expensive concept of using paid media to advance his legislative and political agenda. McDougal had a connection to that as well. In April 1985, he replenished the coffers of the permanent campaign by holding a fundraiser at his Madison branch office in Little Rock, helping to pay off Clinton’s political debts, including unsecured personal loans from the Bank of Cherry Valley, which was owned by Clinton’s aide and fatherly adviser, Maurice Smith. Clinton and Betsey Wright attended the McDougal fundraiser for “about twenty-five minutes,” Wright recalled. Wright viewed the event as an effort by McDougal to “heal a breach with Bill” that had formed since the disappointment of the Whitewater deal. McDougal later said it was Maurice Smith who asked him to stage the event, and that he and Smith, both nondrinkers, had sat up in his office on the second floor while Clinton made the rounds down below. Wright collected the contributions from McDougal and deposited the checks in Clinton’s campaign account that night.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, who touched all three corners of the triangle, saw no conflict in her actions. As a lawyer, she said that she was acting professionally, dissociating herself from fees gathered by Rose in its dealings with the state, giving her best advice to clients, whether they were the FDIC or Madison Guaranty. As a wife and mother, she was trying to bring her family financial security. As a political adviser and pro bono public servant, she was devoting her time and intellect to the betterment of the state. Her motives always seemed practical—she was looking for solutions—but there was also a sanctimonious aspect to it that tended to blind her and her husband to the appearances of what they were doing. Clinton considered her the ethical pillar of their partnership. If she handled a matter for him, he assumed that it would be done extraordinarily well; hence his decision to pick her to lead the Education Standards Committee, because she was “the person closer to me than anyone else,” and his statement to Morris that “anyone else would mangle” the Grand Gulf dilemma. He thought she would keep him out of trouble.
Hillary dismissed those who questioned her actions as quibblers who did not appreciate that what she was doing was for the greater good. She framed her actions in moral terms. Beyond all the particulars, in the grand scheme of right and wrong, she felt with almost religious conviction that she was on the side of right. Don Jones, the Drew University theology professor who had been her religious mentor during her youth in Park Ridge, and who admired her greatly, got into an argument with her during a visit to Little Rock. They were discussing the works of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and soon enough Jones found himself disputing Hillary’s contention that some causes were closer to the will of God than others. “I said, ‘I don’t think you can equate any cause, however good, to the will of God,’ ” Jones recalled. “I began a discourse on the dangers of idolatry and quoted from Lincoln’s second inaugural address—the North thinks God is on its side, the South thinks God is on its side, but the Almighty has his own purposes.”
RELIGION played an increasingly important role in the lives of the Clintons through the eighties, the most demanding decade of their partnership. They came out of vastly different religious cultures and attended separate churches on Sunday, yet Hillary, the United Methodist, and Bill, the Southern Baptist, both found that faith eased the burden of their high-profile lives, sometimes offering solace and escape from the contentious world of politics, at other times providing theological support for their political choices. Their religious evolutions were similar, reflecting a generational trend: churchgoing was an essential part of their early adolescent years, less apparent during their late teens and twenties, and more vital again as they moved through their thirties into mature parenthood and middle age. The intensity of their faith seemed to increase in proportion to their growing ambitions and responsibilities in careers where the rewards of adulation and accomplishment were counterbalanced by the strains of compromise and criticism.
Hillary Clinton seemed to fit her religion and her church so well that one of her ministers called her “a model of Methodism.” She was, in fact, the human model and inspiration for her husband’s emerging political theme of opportunity and responsibility, which she traced back to the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, an eighteenth-century Anglican priest who mixed social reform with evangelical piety. “As a member of the British Parliament, he spoke out for the poor at a time when their lives were being transformed by far-reaching industrial and economic changes,” she said in a speech explaining why she was a Methodist. “He spent the rest of his life evangelizing among the same people he had spoken up for in Parliament. He preached a gospel of social justice, demanding as determinedly as ever that society do right by all its people. But he also preached a gospel of personal responsibility, asking every man and woman to take responsibility for their own lives … and cultivate the habits that would make them productive.”
Hillary’s church in downtown Little Rock, First United Methodist, was dominated by productive, achievement-oriented professionals with an interest in modest social reform. It seemed to have a special attraction for lawyers: there were seventy-six in the membership, including many of the leading legal lights in the city. The local bar association held its meetings at the church every month. From its earliest days, United Methodist had played a benevolent function in the community. It sponsored a home for unwed mothers at the turn of the century, and later opened a major child development center and launched the first telephone crisis hotline service in Little Rock. Hillary donated funds for the child care center, served on the administrative board of the church, performed free legal work for the Methodist Church in Arkansas, and traveled the state giving speeches on the personal meaning of Methodism.
In those speeches, she would talk about John Wesley and Methodist history, about her church youth group experiences in Park Ridge, about the balance between personal and social behavior, and finally about her personal relationship with God. Somewhere in her speech she would recite her favorite exhortation from Wesley: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” Yet at the core of her belief, thought one of her ministers at United Methodist, Reverend Ed Matthews, was a personal need as strong or stronger than the social commitment. “One of her favorite thoughts,” Matthews later reflected, “was that the goal of life is to restore what has been lost, to find oneness with God, and until we find this we are lonely.”
It could be said that Bill Clinton also turned to religion in search of something that had been lost: a father.
His church was Immanuel Baptist, an imposing, rectangular shrine of gold and tan that occupied two full city blocks, standing alone on a hill at Tenth and Bishop, looming above the Capitol and the workday world of Little Rock. It was the largest church in Arkansas, with more than four thousand members and a statewide television audience for the live broadcast of the eleven o’clock Sunday services. The differences in the Clintons’ churches were as obvious as Hillary’s midwestern reserve and Bill’s unabashed southern manner. Hillary, as Reverend Matthews once said, was “not going to tote her Bible to church; she wasn’t going to flaunt it. Baptists like Bill carried their Bibles to church.” Clinton’s Bible was old and dog-eared, an expression of his desire to master this course of study as he would any other. He was a second tenor in the church choir, and though he never had time for choir practice, on Sundays he “would get up there and act as though he had rehearsed the whole thing,” recalled Mary Frances Vaught, the wife of the minister. “He would sing as big as anything.”
Clinton did not go to church for social activism, nor did he go for fire and brimstone judgment and guilt-ridden repentance; he went, largely, to search for the better part of himself in a place where he could be accepted at face value. Dr. Worley Oscar Vaught, the leader of Immanuel Baptist, provided that atmosphere. They seemed an unlikely pair: Clinton the tall, bushy-haired, effusive, ambitious, freewheeling and liberal-leaning young politician, and Vaught the short, bald, bespectacled, stern-voiced, conservative religious scholar, who had been preaching since the year before Clinton was born. But Vaught was, like Clinton, at once a storyteller and an intellectual, translating the Old and the New Testaments from Hebrew and Greek and giving his worshipers detailed syntactical and semantic explications of the text. He was methodical and patient, taking more than a year to get through Genesis and devoting two or three years to Romans and Matthew. He would start every service by leading his congregation in reciting Hebrews 4:12: “The word of God is alive and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, to the dividing asunder of the soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and interests of the heart.” Later, somewhere in each sermon, he would pause and in his surprisingly strong and authoritative voice, inquire, “Are you listening?”
Clinton was always listening to Vaught, during the sermons and in their frequent conversations. As someone who tended to think in metaphors, Clinton related the Bible to his role as governor. Each morning when he reached his office in the Capitol, there would be a quote from scripture on his desk, placed there by his personal secretary, Lynda Dixon, who also worshiped at Immanuel Baptist. He and Dixon would talk about the passage for a minute before getting to work. During the course of the day, according to Betsey Wright, Clinton would include Vaught in his round of calls, and later, “in the course of a conversation, he would say, ‘Well, Dr. Vaught told me such-and-such.’ ” Although Vaught did not presume to tell Clinton what to do, he had a profound effect on the governor’s thinking on several important social issues, most notably the death penalty and abortion.
On capital punishment, Vaught took the initiative when it became apparent that Clinton would soon have to start setting dates for executions and make his first life-or-death calls concerning death-row inmates. Since his race for attorney general in 1976, Clinton had stated publicly that he supported the death penalty, but Vaught sensed that Clinton was still struggling with the issue a decade later and that he was deeply ambivalent. He called Clinton one day and said he would like to talk to the governor about it. Clinton invited him to the mansion for breakfast. He had “gone over it a thousand times,” Clinton told Vaught, and was now asking himself the question about capital punishment, “Not is this the right thing to do, but is it always the wrong thing to do.” Vaught told Clinton that in the original translations of the Ten Commandments, capital punishment was not prohibited. In ancient Hebrew and Greek, he said, the phrase was “thou shalt not murder,” not “thou shalt not kill”—which he said meant it was not the same thing as the laws of the land applying capital punishment. Clinton said he appreciated that interpretation because he had “instinctively thought you could make arguments for and against capital punishment, but didn’t think it was a violation of Christian faith.” You can make your own judgment about whether you think it’s right or wrong, Vaught told him, “but you must never worry about whether it’s forbidden by the Bible, because it isn’t.”
On the abortion issue, it was Clinton who solicited Vaught’s advice. He had ambivalent feelings about it personally, though he agreed with the pro-choice argument intellectually and was surrounded by strong pro-choice women, including Hillary and Betsey Wright. Yet he was struggling with the notion of the definition of a human life, and he wondered whether Vaught could provide some insight from his readings of the Old and New Testaments. Vaught, who was not among the active anti-abortion clergy in Little Rock, said he shared some of Clinton’s ambivalence. He told the governor that he was almost always opposed to abortion, but had seen “some extremely difficult cases” in his life as a pastor and did not believe that the Bible forbade it in all circumstances. In the original Hebrew, Vaught said, the meaning of life and birth and personhood came from words which literally meant “to breathe life into.” From that he concluded that the literal meaning of life in the Bible would be that it began at birth, with the first intake of breath. That did not mean that abortion was right, he told Clinton, but he did not think one could say it was murder. In all of his discussions about abortion thereafter, Clinton relied on his minister’s interpretation to bolster his pro-choice position.
Some of Clinton’s progressive friends were shocked by his relationship with Vaught, who was considered a symbol of Little Rock’s old guard. They worried that the minister’s influence was making Clinton more conservative, or alternatively that the governor was using the minister. In fact, Clinton and Vaught shared a common condition. Vaught was a transitional figure in the long-running fight between fundamentalists and moderates within the Southern Baptist Church. He used the devices of the fundamentalists, the reliance on scripture, but he supported the intellectual curiosity and openness of the moderates. Clinton considered himself a transitional figure between political liberals and conservatives. He was using the political equivalent of biblical language in an effort to bring about change. Vaught delighted in this aspect of Clinton, and thought it eventually would take him where he wanted to go.
At a small dinner for the Vaughts’ fiftieth wedding anniversary at a restaurant atop the Union Bank Building overlooking the broad expanse of Little Rock, the elderly preacher turned to his young disciple and said, “Bill, one of these days I want to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.”