SAYING THE WORDS
EIGHTEEN YEARS AFTER the Rhodes Scholars of the class of 1968 sailed across the Atlantic aboard the S.S. United States on their way to the ancient colleges of Oxford, where they were trained as “the best men for the world’s fight,” the old boys were reaching forty. Of their class of thirty-two scholars, all were still alive except Frank Aller, the draft resister who committed suicide. Doctor, lawyer, scientist, professor, journalist, investor, art curator, military officer—most of them had reached some level of achievement in their professions. Bob Reich was teaching politics and economics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Strobe Talbott was Washington bureau chief of Time magazine. Both had gained acclaim as authors, Reich writing about industrial policy and world trade, Talbott about nuclear arms control. But only one class member seemed intent on engaging in the world’s fight in the largest sense of Cecil Rhodes’s imperative. In his annual class letter in the American Oxonian, secretary Reich finally broached a subject in 1986 that he and many of his classmates had contemplated since their days together in England: Bill Clinton running for president.
“The latest polls in Arkansas show that the governor has a seventy-two percent approval rating, which places him in the same category as McDonald’s hamburgers and Dan Rather, ahead of Ronald Reagan and the new Coca-Cola,” Reich wrote. “Rumor has it that Bill will be the Democratic candidate for president in 1988. I just made up that rumor, but by the time you read this, the rumor will have spread to the ends of the nation.”
The expectation was always there. It had started long before there was any sense to it, back when Clinton’s mother boasted that a second-grade teacher had told her that her boy could be president. Or perhaps it went back generations further, back to his poor southern forebears who connected themselves, if only in name, to things presidential: back to Thomas Jefferson Blythe, a Confederate private from Tippah County, Mississippi, who once bet a saddle on the outcome of a sheriffs race; and to Andrew Jackson Blythe of Tennessee; and to George Washington Cassidy of Red Level, Alabama. Wherever it came from, it was always there, not a matter of predestination but of expectation and will, and it had built up year by year, decade by decade.
ON August 26, 1986, one week after he turned forty, Clinton ascended to the chairmanship of the National Governors Association (NGA) at the group’s summer meeting in Hilton Head, South Carolina. In his acceptance speech that night, he satirized his passage into middle age, wondering whether this would be a “milestone or millstone” year for “the first of the over-the-hill baby boomers.” He also stirred the audience with a campaign-style oration in which he said his priority as chairman would be to help create more jobs. “Let me be clear,” he said. “We do not need further studies. We have a wealth of excellent material outlining the dimensions of the problem. What I want are action plans and programs.”
The chairmanship of the NGA was part of Clinton’s own action plan. It allowed him to develop issues that he cared about, that he thought were essential to the revival of the Democratic party, especially jobs creation, education reform, and an overhaul of the welfare system, while at the same time providing him a forum to expand his reputation. He felt relaxed and at home with this collegial group of state executive peers. Here was a place where he could fit in and yet easily stand out. Harry Hughes, the governor of Maryland, recalled that his lasting image of Clinton at NGA conventions was of him “always standing, never sitting.” Hughes contrasted Clinton’s style at the meetings with those of two other ambitious governors, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts arid Mario Cuomo of New York. Dukakis was usually seated, Hughes said, plugging his way through plenary sessions, talking earnestly, while Cuomo rarely bothered to show up at all, and when he did, tended to remain apart from the gang. Clinton was always in the middle of the action, working the room, leaning against a wall perhaps, surrounded by governors and staff members, telling a joke or leading an informal discussion about the latest book by urban historian Jane Jacobs or sociologist William J. Wilson or his friend Bob Reich.
Along with the camaraderie, the Governors Association gave Clinton opportunities to travel outside Arkansas and deliver speeches. He took on another post earlier that year that offered him additional national visibility, as chairman of the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based nonprofit commission that provided research on education issues to state officials. Little Rock state representative Gloria Cabe, whose loyalty to Clinton went back to the bleak days after his 1980 defeat, served as his educational liaison to both national groups. “Nobody ever told me to behave in this manner, so it was largely my attitude, but through all the work I did for him in national organizations, it was with the notion that he was going to run for president,” Cabe recalled. There was no reason for Clinton to make his national ambitions too explicit at first, especially not until after his reelection that November in his noisy but not particularly close rematch with Frank White. After the election, as he began his fourth term as governor, it became increasingly obvious to his staff, as well as to Arkansas legislators and journalists, that his attention was elsewhere.
EARLY on the evening of March 20, 1987, the office of Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas issued a brief statement announcing that he would not be a candidate for president in 1988. The announcement came as a surprise to some in the political world. Since the beginning of the year, Bumpers had been traveling the country, meeting with prominent Democratic party financiers and operatives, seeming to prepare the groundwork for a presidential campaign. Only the week before, New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who had already issued the first of many statements of noncandidacy for himself, predicted that Bumpers would make the race. But this was not the first time that Bumpers had edged toward the national spotlight and then receded from it. He had first been urged to run for president in 1976, shortly after he left the governor’s office for the Senate. He had considered it again in 1984. Now, at sixty-one, he was taking himself out of consideration for the last time. Running for president, he said in his statement, “means a total disruption of the closeness my family has cherished. If victorious, much of that closeness is necessarily lost forever. So I’ll turn to other challenges.”
The quiet announcement from the office of Senator Bumpers in Washington reverberated loudly in the office of Governor Clinton in Little Rock. Whatever Bumpers did or did not do was always of great interest to Clinton. Their relationship had gone through brief periods of hostility and longer periods of reconciliation and alliance, but it had always been marked by a certain amount of tension. They were separated by twenty years, yet often got in each other’s way. Only a year earlier, Clinton had talked to friends about challenging Bumpers for the Senate seat, but was dissuaded by Hillary, who thought he would be unhappy in the Senate, and by polls that showed Bumpers would beat Clinton in a primary. Now, with Bumpers out of the presidential derby, Clinton seriously considered making the race. Alone in his office or in the kitchen of the mansion, he worked the telephone day and night talking to friends about the pros and cons. Legislators noted that he seemed distracted, disinterested in state affairs. He was losing the major tax initiatives that year which he had hoped would pay for the final parts of his education reform effort.
Clinton and Betsey Wright dispatched scouts to Iowa, New Hampshire, and several Super Tuesday primary states to gauge how a Clinton candidacy might be received. Gloria Cabe ventured up to New Hampshire and spent three days in a Holiday Inn calling campaign activists from a list Clinton had compiled. She was preparing the way for Clinton’s first campaign-style swing through the state, which went so well that he returned home “flying like a kite,” convinced that he could finish second there and then win the southern primaries. Fundraising letters were sent to the extensive network of out-of-state friends Clinton had accumulated over the years. Charlie Daniels, the old plumber from Virginia who had met Clinton in Moscow, mailed back the first contribution. He and his wife Ethel received a note from Clinton: “Your willingness to help us defray costs while we are testing the waters is a very special vote of confidence and I’m very grateful. You’ve been wonderful friends—Thanks for everything—Things are going well—Bill.” In Arkansas, Clinton began working on seed money commitments for the $1.5 to $2 million he had been told he would need to raise within his home state to make a creditable race. Betsey Wright thought about taking a leave from the governor’s staff to concentrate on the presidential effort.
In the early morning of May 7, another Democrat was scratched from the field. This time it was Gary Hart who was forced to withdraw in the face of questions, allegations, and documented evidence regarding his extramarital sex life, which Hart had helped turn into an issue by denying that he was a philanderer and challenging reporters to tail him if they doubted his word. It was an unfortunate challenge which the Miami Herald took up, leading to an article in that newspaper and subsequent pictures in a tabloid detailing Hart’s dalliance with a model named Donna Rice. Hart’s sudden fall increased the pressure on Clinton from both ends. From one end came more longtime political pros from the McGovern era who had been allied with Hart but were now looking to Clinton as an alternative. And from the other end came the question: Did Bill Clinton have a Gary Hart problem?
As journalists and party activists in Washington asked the question among themselves, and in so doing advanced Clinton’s reputation as a womanizer, Clinton and his friends and advisers struggled with how to deal with it. Bob Armstrong, the former Texas Land Commissioner who had developed an easygoing, big-brotherly friendship with Clinton since they worked together in the McGovern campaign, had several telephone conversations with Clinton in the aftermath of the Hart implosion. One of the issues Clinton brought up, according to Armstrong, was whether there was “a statute of limitations on infidelity—whether you get any credit for getting it back together.” Armstrong told Clinton that he thought not. Clinton and Betsey Wright also had several private debates over the lessons of the Hart episode. Clinton “wanted to believe and advocated that it was irrelevant to whether the guy could be a good president,” Wright recalled. She argued that it had a significant bearing in Hart’s case “because it raised questions about his stability.” Any previous affairs might have been irrelevant, she said, but “to have one while he was running was foolhardy.”
Clinton agreed. Hart, he said, was foolish to flaunt it.
Dick Morris, still a Clinton pollster and consultant though his other clients by then were almost exclusively Republicans, was also brought into the discussions. Clinton questioned Morris at length about how he thought the public would react to the infidelity issue and whether it would be held against him. They gingerly explored different ways to address the topic or sidestep it. Morris sensed that Clinton had “a tremendous terror of the race because of the personal scandals that were visited upon candidates who ran. His experience watching candidates be destroyed by those scandals or impaired by them chilled him, and led him to a feeling that this was a terribly inhospitable environment upon which to tread.” The sex issue, Morris said, “loomed large in his consideration. It loomed very large.”
But the momentum kept building for Clinton to run. He traveled to Washington for a foreign policy briefing set up by Steve Cohen, the friend of his and Hillary’s from Yale Law who had attended the first gubernatorial inaugural in Little Rock eight years earlier, where he had told Clinton about how taken he was by the “pride and hope” he felt there. Sandy Berger and John Holum, two veterans of the McGovern and Hart campaigns, helped Cohen with the briefing. Back in Little Rock, Wright and her assistants prepared for a possible announcement. Their first choice was the House chamber inside the Capitol, but state law prohibited its use for political events of that sort, so they rented a ballroom at the Excelsior Hotel for July 15.
Rumors about Clinton’s extramarital sex life began making the rounds in Little Rock. A few days before the announcement, Wright met with Clinton at her home on Hill Street. The time had come, she felt, for Clinton to get past what she considered his self-denial tendencies and face the issue squarely. For years, she told friends later, she had been covering up for him. She was convinced that some state troopers were soliciting women for him, and he for them, she said. Sometimes when Clinton was on the road, Wright would call his room in the middle of the night and no one would answer. She hated that part of him, but felt that the other sides of him overshadowed his personal weaknesses.
“Okay,” she said to him as they sat in her living room. Then she started listing the names of women he had allegedly had affairs with and the places where they were said to have occurred. “Now,” she concluded, “I want you to tell me the truth about every one.” She went over the list twice with Clinton, according to her later account, the second time trying to determine whether any of the women might tell their stories to the press. At the end of the process, she suggested that he should not get into the race. He owed it to Hillary and Chelsea not to.
The next day, Wright drove to the airport and picked up Carl Wagner, the first of a group of Clinton friends who had planned to gather in Little Rock for the presidential announcement. Wagner was a generational co-hort who had met Clinton during the Project Pursestrings antiwar effort in the summer of 1970. They had gone through the McGovern campaign together, Wagner running Michigan while Clinton ran Texas, and had kept in touch ever since. Wagner, like Clinton, loved to talk on the phone. Clinton had asked him to come down to Little Rock a day early to help “think this thing through.” On the way back from the airport, Wright did not tell Wagner about her encounter with Clinton the day before. She did offer her opinion that her boss seemed “too conflicted” and “might not be ready.”
Wagner met with Clinton and Hillary at the Governor’s Mansion that night. They sat around the table in the kitchen and talked for several hours. It was, Wagner recalled, an intense, blunt conversation in which he and Hillary assessed the practicality of Clinton making the presidential race, element by element. Could Clinton raise $20 million? Did he have the time he needed? They analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the other candidates, especially the probable Republican nominee, Vice President George Bush. Wagner thought that the economy would be strong enough to make Bush difficult to beat. Clinton was surprised by that argument and launched into a long discussion of economic policy. Wagner noticed that Clinton was more comfortable talking about policy, depersonalizing the discussion. He wondered whether Clinton was prepared for the consequences if he became a candidate. At the end of the evening, as Clinton and Hillary moved toward the stairs leading from the kitchen up to their second-floor bedroom, Clinton turned to Wagner, who was still seated at the table, and asked, “So what’s the bottom line?”
“I tell you what,” Wagner responded. “When you reach the top of the steps, walk into your daughter’s bedroom, look at her, and understand that if you do this, your relationship with her will never be the same. I’m not sure if it will be worse or better, but it will never be the same.”
After Clinton disappeared up the steps, Wagner went to the phone and called Steve Cohen, who planned to be at the announcement. “Jesus Christ,” Cohen remembered Wagner telling him, “this guy doesn’t know whether he wants to run!” Cohen called Sandy Berger, who also had airplane reservations for Little Rock. There was a chance Clinton might not run, Cohen said. They decided to go anyway.
By early afternoon the next day, a dozen Clinton friends from around the country had congregated at the Governor’s Mansion for an announcement-eve luncheon. Most waited in the living room as Clinton sat on the porch steps leading out to the back lawn, engaged in a final conversation with Wagner and Mickey Kantor, the California lawyer and Democratic activist who had been part of Clinton’s network since the Carter era. If Clinton had privately made up his mind after the encounter with Betsey Wright, if he had reached a decision after the discussion with Wagner in the kitchen the night before, he still felt a need to weigh the options to the last possible moment. Kantor took the lead as they talked about the level of commitment that a national campaign required. As they talked, Chelsea, then seven years old, approached her father and asked him about a family vacation planned for later that summer. As Kantor remembered the scene, Clinton told his daughter that he might not be able to go because he might be running for president. “Well,” Kantor recalled Chelsea responding, “then Mom and I will go without you.”
Chelsea always had a powerful effect on Clinton. He carried pictures of her around in his wallet and showed them to friends whenever he was on the road. He could get misty-eyed talking about her. They held hands whenever they were together. When he was in town, he tried to drive her to school every morning. Earlier that year, on a Sunday morning at the start of the legislative session, his aide and former high school teacher, Paul Root, and Root’s wife Mary, who was also a teacher, accompanied Clinton and Chelsea to a prayer breakfast at the First Baptist Church in Benton. When father and daughter came out of the mansion and got into the car, Root recalled, Clinton said that he might not talk to them much on the ride down to Benton because he did not get that much time with Chelsea and their favorite thing to do together was read books. Chelsea opened her church book and found her favorite story. Father and daughter read it aloud together. They did the same thing on the way home from Benton. As they neared the mansion, Clinton turned to Mary Root and asked, “Is that okay? The way I was reading to her?”
The subtext of Clinton’s relationship with his daughter was his own unfortunate history with fathers. He did not want to be considered a neglectful father himself, yet his political obsession gave him little time with Chelsea. He would try to soften the guilt by joking about it, often telling the story of how, when Chelsea was asked to describe what her father did, she said, “He gives speeches, drinks coffee, and talks on the telephone.” It was as true as it was amusing. Now, when Kantor saw the look on Clinton’s face after Chelsea matter-of factly scratched her father from the family vacation plans, he was sure that Clinton would not run for president that year. “It was the turning point of the conversation,” he said later.
Clinton faced the gathering of friends in the dining room and apologized for luring them all down to Little Rock for no reason. No problem, they said, one after another, some fighting to keep their composure. The struggle between family and ambition was something all of them had dealt with in various ways. John Holum helped Clinton draft a statement. Clinton did not want the news to slip out haphazardly. He had friends around the country who were expecting him to run, and he wanted them to learn about his decision at the same time. Betsey Wright and Gloria Cabe and several other aides and friends worked the telephones, setting up the calls for him and alerting the national press that there was no need to make the trip to Arkansas. Wait for another day, he said to many of those he called, “because it’s coming.” One of those who heard from Clinton was Billie Carr in Houston. It was a sentimental conversation during which Clinton talked about the importance of “putting his house in order.” Carr said she understood. “All of us in politics feel bad about neglecting our families,” she said later. “We feel bad about it—but not too bad.”
Clinton’s statement was issued late in the day. “I need some family time: I need some personal time,” he said. “Politicians are people too. I think sometimes we forget it, but they really are. The only thing I or any other candidate has to offer in running for president is what’s inside. That’s what sets people on fire and gets their confidence and their votes, whether they live in Wisconsin or Montana or New York. That part of my life needs renewal. The other, even more important reason for my decision is the certain impact that this campaign would have had on our daughter. The only way I could have won, getting in this late, after others had been working up to two years, would be to go on the road full time from now until the end, and to have Hillary do the same thing…. I’ve seen a lot of kids grow up under these pressures and a long, long time ago I made a promise to myself that if I was ever lucky enough to have a child, she would never grow up wondering who her father was.”
That night, a group of Clinton’s high school friends gathered at Carolyn Staley’s house near the mansion in Little Rock. Clinton, his staff had said, would be too busy to attend, but he came over anyway. The friends had suspected that he would find his way there: Bill usually sought them out when he needed to ease the pressure and emotion of his public life. Just looking at David Leopoulos could make him feel better. “So,” Leopoulos said at one point that night, “this reminds me of the Fuhgawe Indians.” Clinton was the only one in the room who knew what Leopoulos was talking about. They both started laughing. It was their oldest, corniest joke, one they used to tell as they sat atop the mountain above Hot Springs. It was about the Indians who had no name until they got lost in the mountains and one of them asked, “Where the fuhgawe?”
ON a Sunday morning in early February of 1988, Clinton was asked to talk to a class of single adults at Immanuel Baptist Church. Most members of the group were professionals in their twenties and thirties. The theme he chose was “the conflict between the idea of progress and the certainty of death.” Sometimes, he said, it is hard “to keep going when you know that the sand’s running out of the hourglass. Yet you still have a moral obligation to try to make tomorrow better than today.” A few days later, in a speech at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Clinton recalled his Sunday School sermon and said that in his own life he had two hourglasses going at once, one his mortality as a person and the other his mortality as a politician. Knowing about the first made him feel more urgency about the second and all that he still hoped to accomplish. “I think about it,” he said, “as the time ebbs away.”
ATLANTA, Georgia: July 20, 1988. This was the third consecutive convention at which Clinton had made the coveted list of speakers. In 1980, he had been selected to present the issues affecting the nation’s governors. In 1984, his assignment was to deliver a tribute to Harry Truman. This 1988 Democratic National Convention might have been the time he talked about himself. But another governor, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, had top billing, and another governor, Ann Richards of Texas, became a star as the keynote speaker. Jesse Jackson had already stirred the convention hall with an emotional speech. Clinton would give the nominating speech for Dukakis. By tradition, several speakers nominated a presidential candidate. Clinton would do it alone, in prime time, before all the audiences he wanted to reach. It could be the first speech of his future campaign.
Clinton had stayed up all night revising his speech, going through nine full drafts. Ordinarily he spoke extemporaneously, working off notes, but this speech had to be a finished document, to be read and approved by Dukakis and his aides. Hillary had never seen him work so hard on a speech, she told friends. He would tackle a section, go over it with his advisers, and then scrap it and redo it, again and again, adding more themes, inserting paragraphs. His secretary got so worn out typing and retyping drafts overnight that she ended up needing medical treatment for exhaustion. By midmorning, when the manuscript was essentially finished, Clinton was concerned that it was too long, yet Dukakis aides called three more times with suggested additions. Clinton had been allotted twenty minutes, including pauses for applause and demonstrations, and it was timed with no interruptions at sixteen minutes. His advisers had other concerns. Betsey Wright, Gloria Cabe, and Bruce Lindsey, the Little Rock lawyer who was becoming Clinton’s most trusted traveling aide, had all listened to him give countless rousing speeches that brought his audiences to standing ovations. They knew that it would be hard to turn an introduction into a scintillating oration. But this text, Cabe thought, had been redone so many times by Clinton and had so many inserts from the Dukakis camp that it had become plain vanilla. After reading it with Lindsey and Wright, she turned to them and said, “All the Bill Clinton’s been taken out of it.”
After the dress rehearsal at the convention hall in late afternoon, Clinton and Hillary paid a visit to the Dukakises at their hotel room. The speech. Dukakis said, was exactly what he wanted. He loved it. “No matter what happens,” Clinton later recalled Dukakis telling him, “give the speech.”
Clinton went to the microphone confidently that night, to the theme of Chariots of Fire playing on the sound system. “I’m honored to be here tonight to nominate my friend Michael Dukakis for President of the United States,” he began. That was the rhetorical high point. It went downhill from there. Clinton and his aides had hoped that the house lights would be dimmed and the crowd silenced for a thoughtful presentation. But the lights stayed on, and Dukakis delegates, who had remained relatively subdued for two days while Jackson delegates dominated the scene, were now being whipped up by cheerleaders on the convention floor. Inside the convention hall, Clinton s words were an inaudible drone. It was no better on television.
Betsey Wright stood at the back of the podium, overtaken by a “completely helpless feeling.” She tried to have the lights lowered. No one would do it. Hillary was posted nearby, furious about the lights and the sight of Dukakis floor whips instructing delegates to cheer every time Clinton mentioned his name. Gloria Cabe was seated with the Arkansas delegation, “pissed off” that she could not hear the speech above the orchestrated commotion. Harry Truman Moore was also on the floor, with his camera out, recording the scene for the Paragould Daily Press. Caught between two clumps of Dukakis and Jackson delegates engaged in a shouting match, turning his lens first up at his longtime friend who seemed to be dying on stage, then back at the painful faces of his colleagues in the Arkansas delegation, Moore felt he was witnessing “one of the most miserable political experiences” he had ever been through. As the speech dragged on, past sixteen minutes, past twenty minutes, it got even worse. ABC cut away at the twenty-one-minute mark and began showing a film. On NBC, Tom Brokaw uttered forlornly, “We have to be here, too,” and then gave up on the speech. CBS showed a red light flashing on the podium, a signal for Clinton to shut up, then found a delegate in the audience giving Clinton the cut sign with the hand slash across the throat. People could be heard shouting: “Get the hook! Get the hook!”
A few minutes into his speech, Clinton had seen that he had lost the audience. He considered abandoning the text and firing up the crowd with a few campaign-style exhortations and getting off the stage. But as he later explained, or rationalized, he kept his word to Dukakis to read the entire speech. After thirty-two excruciating minutes, when he uttered “In closing”—one of the few adlibbed phrases in his speech—the hall erupted in mocking applause. Clinton and his entourage knew it was a lost opportunity, but they did not realize how disastrous until Bruce Lindsey called Cabe’s husband in Little Rock and asked what it had looked like on television. “God, Lindsey, Bill was awful!” Robert Cabe said. Clinton, Hillary, and Betsey Wright decided on a swift counterattack. They would spread the word on the problems in the hall as Clinton was giving his speech, without saying anything negative about Dukakis. Clinton, meanwhile, worked the hospitality suites and parties around town, talking to activists and journalists and anyone who would hear him out. The strategy recalled the days after his loss to Frank White in 1980, when he talked obsessively about what had happened to him and what he had done wrong, confronting friends and strangers in supermarkets and bookstores and anywhere he could find them.
The morning after was unforgiving. Deborah Norville on NBC’s Today asked Tom Pettit how Clinton could have been described as “someone to watch” on the national scene. “Now we know better,” deadpanned Pettit. Frank Greer, a media consultant who admired Clinton and wanted to work for him on a political campaign, was quoted repeating a line he said he had heard after the speech: “‘It was either the longest nominating speech or the shortest presidential campaign speech in history.’” Television columnist Tom Shales of The Washington Post described it under the headline “The Numb and the Restless.” While Jesse Jackson had electrified the crowd the night before, Shales wrote, Clinton had calcified it. Johnny Carson’s writers delighted in the material Clinton had provided them for The Tonight Show. Carson would begin his next monologue by saying, “In closing…” Then he would note that the Surgeon General had just approved Governor Bill Clinton as an over-the-counter sleep aid, and that Clinton’s speech went over “about as big as the Velcro condom,” and that when it came to drama, Clinton was “right up there with PBS pledge breaks.”
The Clintons tried to defuse the situation with humor. “It was the worst hour of my life—no, make that hour and a half,” Clinton told the Boston Globe. “Last night was just weird,” Hillary told a forlorn caucus of Arkansas delegates who gathered the next morning at the Embassy Suites for a postmortem. She quoted her husband as telling her, “‘Well, that’s the last time I’ll nominate anybody for anything!’” She hoped that the speech would soon be forgotten. “Political history remakes itself every twenty-four hours. Every day is an opportunity to make a new speech.” Still, she was fighting for her husband and the future of their political partnership, and she could not entirely control her competitive bent. “If the criticism is that Bill talked too long and was ponderous,” she said, “hey, that’s criticism of all the Bill Bradleys and all the Mike Dukakises of the world.” She was still simmering on the plane ride back to Little Rock Friday morning, according to Gloria Cabe, who sat next to her. “We felt like we had made some small steps toward recovery but were still flabbergasted by the enormity of the event,” Cabe recalled. “And of all things, for people to think he was a bad speaker! You could say a lot of things about him, but that was just not accurate.”
Betsey Wright had flown back a day earlier, before the convention was over, and she called a staff meeting. Several members of Clinton’s staff had watched the speech at the Oyster Bar restaurant in Little Rock and were confused and demoralized when they gathered to hear Wright’s account. Wright intended to give a calm assessment of what had happened. But not long after she began her explanation, she started sobbing.
IF Clinton intended to finish his political career as the governor of Arkansas, the recovery from the speech could have ended with the adjournment of the convention. But the permanent campaign was a national endeavor now. The vast network of friends that he and Hillary had constructed across the country was seeking reassurance. Judy Trabulsi in Austin, his friend from the McGovern days, was flooded with calls from acquaintances eager to tease her. “So this is the guy you say is going to be president? What a joke!” There was more face-saving work to be done. Clinton needed to transform the disaster into an opportunity by doing something creative and dramatic. Friends in Hollywood, producers Linda Bloodworth Thomason and Harry Thomason, an Arkansas native whose brother Danny was the Clintons’ optometrist, conceived the answer. They arranged for him to appear on The Tonight Show, where he nervously played “Summertime” on his saxophone and made self-effacing jokes that inspired Johnny Carson to laugh with him, not at him. More Americans watched that show than had listened to his convention speech.
That summer and fall of 1988 marked the first even-numbered year since 1974 that Clinton was not engaged in his own political race. Including primaries, runoffs, and general elections, he had been involved in fifteen elections in fourteen years—more elections, he stated with probable justification, than any other politician in America during that stretch. But state election laws had been changed before the 1986 elections to make the gubernatorial term four years instead of two. Now Clinton was without a race, and he was restless, bored, and increasingly distraught about the Dukakis campaign. Gloria Cabe said there were times when she thought he wanted to enlist as Dukakis’s campaign manager. George Bush’s campaign team, led by Lee Atwater, was beating Dukakis over the head with a hammer, making him appear soft on crime by exploiting a case where a Massachusetts felon named Willie Horton had killed again after being released on parole. Clinton knew what he would do in that situation. To continue the metaphor which had been his creed since Frank White had pounded him with negative ads in 1980, he would get out a meat cleaver and cut off Bush’s hands. Dukakis did not respond adequately. Once during that fall, as he was driving from the airport in Fayetteville to give a speech at the University of Arkansas campus, Clinton raged about Dukakis to Woody Bassett. “He was upset that Dukakis had not fought back on Willie Horton,” Bassett later recalled. “He said that he had written a response ad for them, but they had never used it.”
Not long after Dukakis lost, Bob Reich, in his annual letter in the American Oxonian, put into Rhodes classmate Strobe Talbott’s mouth the words that both he and Talbott were thinking. “America,” he wrote, “will survive the next four years the same way it survived the last 20 since we set sail for England: waiting for Clinton to become president.”
Clinton was already making plans. Two days after Christmas, nearly a month before Bush would be inaugurated, Clinton met with John Pouland, a Dallas lawyer who had been the southern coordinator for Gary Hart’s presidential campaign. Pouland had flown up to Little Rock with Randy White, who now worked as an assistant to Pouland’s law partner, Congressman John Bryant. They arrived at the Governor’s Mansion just as Clinton was returning from a jog and adjourned to the study, where they sipped coffee and talked presidential politics for two hours. Clinton was full of questions. Should he run for governor again in 1990 if he wanted to run for president two years later, when he would be in the middle of his term? How much money did he have to raise in Arkansas? Could he be the regional candidate? What about another young southern moderate—Tennessee Senator Al Gore? White left the meeting thinking that Clinton could hardly wait for 1992.
GETTING from here to there would not be easy. Throughout his political career, Clinton often demonstrated a keen ability to foresee obstacles that he might encounter, though he could not always find the surest way around them. Now he seemed anxious about how he would get through the next few years. As his permanent campaign took on a national focus, it lost energy in Arkansas. And he still had to survive in Arkansas. When he went before the General Assembly on January 9, 1989, for his state of the state address, he spoke as the first Arkansas governor in more than a century to open a regular legislative session without just having been inaugurated. More than two years had passed since his last election, and that gap, he told his aides, could prove troublesome. His last major effort to raise the sales tax to fund education programs, in 1987, had been defeated after a heavy lobbying effort against it by the state’s business interests, who opposed the expansion of the tax to cover professional services that had been exempted. This time he had worked with the corporate powers to devise an education agenda and a tax plan that they could support, but the public mood seemed determinedly antitax. George Bush had just won the presidential election lipreading his promise of no new taxes. Without a fresh mandate from the voters, Clinton feared, it would be hard for him to move a recalcitrant legislature.
During the six years of his second act as governor, state aid to education in Arkansas had increased by a greater percentage than in all but six other states. Yet local support of the schools through property taxes had trailed the national average, meaning that Arkansas still lingered in its traditional spot near the bottom in overall education spending. Clinton had built his career on the education issue. He felt there was more to be done. Before the session, during the time when in earlier years he would have been campaigning for reelection, he spent seven months with his staff and a statewide task force preparing a new agenda for expanded preschool, vocational, and higher education programs. But he realized that getting the taxes to pay for it would be harder than ever. “The Great Communicator in Washington, who’s told us that all taxes are evil, has made it hard for us to do what we need to do here,” Clinton said in his state of the state address. “I have two answers to that: First of all, President Reagan said in 1983 that education was the business of the states and if funding had to be increased, the states should raise the taxes to do it…. And secondly, unlike our friends in Washington, we cannot write a check on an account that is not funded. We either raise and spend or we don’t spend.”
That final phrase, taken out of context, would be used against Clinton later, but at the time it was accurate. The 1989 legislature declined to raise taxes; Clinton had no new money to spend on education. His early premonition of trouble had been fulfilled—and more trouble was on the way.
• • •
BETSEY Wright had been at Clinton’s side for nearly a decade, since his loss to Frank White. Nothing that concerned Bill Clinton was too trivial for Major Betsey, as some staff members called her. During his exile, she had sat in his basement and organized his political files, then had followed him to the law firm and took a desk outside his door, in the bullpen with the secretaries. After his restoration, she had followed him back to the Capitol and become his top aide. She was a c hronic chain-smoking overworker, deep-voiced, literate, who reported before dawn and stayed late into the night. Now she was exhausted. Her face, said one friend, seemed frozen in a gaunt expression of pain. Year by year, she had become more of a target of criticism from some good ole boys in the Arkansas legislature, who found her too protective and abrasive. Her relationship with Clinton had grown increasingly tumultuous. They yelled and cursed each other like sailors, but now Wright was becoming more emotional. Policy, personality, private life—everything was getting mixed up into one unsettling stew.
After years of legal deliberations, the first death penalty decisions were approaching in Arkansas. Wright opposed capital punishment but knew that Clinton supported it. They had argued over the death penalty since she had gone to work for him. She wanted to believe, she said later, that his position was based on conviction, not political pragmatism. On the night that mass murderer Ronald Simmons of Russellville was to have been executed, she persuaded Clinton to cancel an appearance at a social function, which she thought would look inappropriate. At the last hour, the court granted a stay of execution. Wright called the governor to tell him, but could not find him at the mansion. She discovered that he was out having dinner with actress Mary Steenburgen, a longtime friend of the Clintons who had grown up in Arkansas.
He was into self-denial again, she told her friends. She concluded that he was going through a severe midlife crisis. She said that he was having a serious affair with another woman, and was not even being discreet about it. Everyone knew, she said. She knew, the troopers knew, Hillary knew. There were great screaming matches at the mansion. Once a counselor was called out to mediate. Clinton was broaching the subject of divorce in conversations with some of his colleagues, governors from other states who had survived the collapse of their marriages. But he told his friends in Arkansas that he wanted to save his marriage. And Hillary wanted to save it, too. She told Wright that she was unwilling to abandon the partnership. She had invested too much in Bill Clinton and was determined to see it through. Wright felt that she had to get away. She was irritable beyond any measure that even she could justify. She was so mad at Clinton that she told him she felt like boiling a pot of water and pouring it over his head. She was, as she would discover later, suffering from a deep clinical depression. Late in the summer of 1989, she told Clinton that she was burned out. She asked for and got a leave of absence.
In the midst of this personal turmoil, Clinton was losing another father. His minister, W. O. Vaught, was in the final stages of bone cancer. Nearly every week Clinton stopped by Vaught’s house to check on him. Once he brought along the evangelist Billy Graham. They stood at Vaught’s bedside and Graham said a prayer. A few days before Christmas, Clinton was among a group of friends who came over to put up the Vaughts’ Christmas tree. When the ailing minister said that he wanted to see it, Clinton picked up the tree and carried it into his room. On Christmas Day, 1989, the old Baptist preacher died. Clinton served as a pallbearer at the funeral, leading the procession down the front steps of Immanuel Baptist Church on the way to Roselawn Memorial Park. At the graveyard, Vaught’s son, Carl Vaught, gave a final speech about his father and the irony of his not being there at this time when everyone needed him. His father, he said, “was doubly aware of how important it was to be present at crucial times.” At that moment, he looked across the grave and caught the watery eyes of Bill Clinton. A few days later, he wrote Clinton a note recalling that moment at the graveyard and saying that he knew Clinton was thinking about some of those special occasions. Clinton wrote back and said he was surprised that Vaught could read his face so clearly.
There is a temptation to dismiss the pious Clinton as somewhat of a poseur, seeking to cover up less righteous aspects of his life. But he was always a man of contrasts and contradictions. Within hours in one day, he could eat pork ribs and listen to the Delta Blues music at Sim’s Bar-B-Que in the lowlands of Little Rock’s predominantly black south side; then drive up to the Heights for a round of golf at the Country Club of Little Rock, an elite hideaway with manicured fairways and no black members; then, on the way home, he might pop in his favorite tape of white Pentecostal gospel music from the Alexandria Sanctuary Chorale. Clinton could go from a meeting with deer hunters in Scott County, furious because the state Game and Fish Commission would not let them run their dogs in December, to an education summit in Charlottesville staying up all night crafting an agenda of education goals for the fifty governors and the Bush administration, to a West Coast fundraising dinner at Norman Lear’s house where he mixed with the Hollywood glitterati. If Clinton had the ability to move easily through so many different worlds, he could also appear a chameleon, forced to balance one world off against another. Capable as he was of great bursts of energy and concentration, no single world could keep him content for long.
• • •
THE year 1990 presented Clinton with one of the toughest political decisions of his career. He had been governor for ten of the last twelve years. What more could he do? he asked his advisers. He seemed tired of the job and feared that the people of Arkansas had grown weary of him. Those were strong reasons not to seek a fifth term. His concern about losing a forum could be alleviated somewhat by another national leadership position that he was assuming, as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a faction of moderates, many of them from the South, who sought to reorient the party toward the white middle class. There were also persuasive reasons to remain in the governor’s office. If he left and started running for president as a former governor, he would be depriving himself of status and a financial power base, especially if President Bush appeared unbeatable in 1992 and Clinton ended up postponing his national run until 1996. He was getting strong advice from former governors, including Jim Hunt of North Carolina and Richard Riley of South Carolina, not to give up the job until he had to: they missed it, they said, and he would, too.
Clinton’s state of mind further complicated the decision. Although he was developing new themes on the national level, back home, in his role as governor, he seemed to be “dithering and depressed,” in the view of Dick Morris, who had helped construct the permanent campaign that had carried him through the eighties. Clinton’s dilemma, as Morris viewed it, was that he was temporarily without a crusade, such as education reform or economic development, and that he was incapable of being a caretaker chief executive. He had to be engaged in “some important, valiant fight for the good of the world to lend coherence and structure to his life, and when he didn’t have those fights he would turn on himself, he would eat away at himself, he would become depressed, paranoid, surly and, one suspects, escapist.” Clinton was an activist, Morris concluded, “because it was the only way he could maintain any reasonable degree of psychological coherence.”
Clinton’s decision-making process in 1990 followed the same wavering pattern as his deliberations about running for president in 1987. During the first two weeks of February, there were fresh rumors every day. One of the most popular, promoted by several of her friends in the Little Rock legal community, was that Hillary would run instead. She seemed as unclear as anyone else about her husband’s plans, even after he had scheduled a press conference at which he was to announce his decison. On the day before the event, according to Gloria Cabe, Hillary called her and asked whether she had any inside information on what Clinton had decided. Betsey Wright, who was still on leave from her post as chief of staff, talked to him the morning of the announcement and was convinced that up to thirty minutes beforehand he intended to relinquish the governorship. Cabe was among those who thought he had decided not to run but changed his mind when he entered the room and began to speak. David Leopoulos, Clinton’s high school friend, later recalled that “you could have knocked Hillary over with a feather” when Clinton declared that he was seeking another term. “She did not expect it. None of us did.”
THE notion that Bill Clinton began his political career as a radical and moved inexorably rightward over the decades is misleading. He was a cautious defender of the establishment during his student politics days at Georgetown. In his Oxford and Yale years, he was in the moderate wing of the antiwar movement. From the beginning of his ascent in Arkansas, he would attack organized labor and court corporate interests when it served his political purposes. He had supported the death penalty since his 1976 race for attorney general. As early as his 1980 speech at the Democratic National Convention in New York, he was turning away from traditional liberal Democratic rhetoric. The sphere in which his movement from left to right seemed most apparent was foreign policy. There is a considerable ideological gap between his antiwar letter to Colonel Holmes, in which he disparaged the military, and his decision in the late 1980s to let the Arkansas National Guard participate in controversial training missions in Central America, at a time when some other governors, who opposed the Reagan administration policies there, refused to let their troops go. But in the full context of his political life, his letter to Colonel Holmes was the aberration, his decision on the National Guard the norm.
On race relations, Clinton used his power as governor to accomplish many of the integrationist goals he had carried since his youth in Hot Springs. He appointed more blacks to state boards and commissions than had all previous Arkansas governors combined. He appointed the first black lawyer to the state Supreme Court, instilled a black woman as the state health chief, and surrounded himself with African Americans in key financial posts, including director of the Department of Finance and Administration. He and Hillary sent Chelsea to a public school in Little Rock that was 60 percent black. But as a politician seeking to survive in a state dominated by conservative white voters—the black population in Arkansas was about 15 percent, the lowest percentage in the South—Clinton was not always able or willing to advance the causes of black activists. Arkansas was one of only two states without a state civil rights law, and he could not persuade the legislature to fund a human rights commission. In 1989, as one of three members of the state Board of Apportionment, Clinton disappointed many of his black supporters by voting to appeal a federal court ruling that substantially increased the number of majority-black legislative districts. He said that he voted for the appeal, which eventually was dismissed, for technical reasons: the apportionment board needed guidance from the high court on its role in redistricting because the 1990 census was approaching.
Clinton’s policy choices throughout the 1980s reflect an activist nature more than shifting ideology. In his effort to reform the education system, he turned to the regressive sales tax as the surest way to get the money. In seeking to lower the state’s unemployment rate, which hovered above 12 percent when he returned to office in 1983 but had dropped to under 7 percent by the end of the decade, he often backed away from strict environmental enforcement and gave major corporations large tax breaks to stay in Arkansas and expand their operations. Tyson Foods received $7.8 million in tax breaks from 1988 to 1990 at a time when the world’s largest poultry firm had a budget twice as large as the state’s. After occasional battles over taxes, lobbying laws, and municipal bond practices, Clinton and the Arkansas business establishment had reached a level of mutual accommodation. He was accepting free rides in corporate jets (Tyson had flown him on nine trips) and soliciting large contributions from corporate leaders for the public relations arm of his permanent campaign. If he was not exactly one of the money boys, he was accepted to the point where Little Rock bankers called him “Pards,” the abbreviated form of “Partner” in the southwestern subculture of oil and finance. Hillary, in her pursuit of financial security, had joined the boards of several corporations, including two of the largest in Arkansas, Wal-Mart and TCBY, the yogurt enterprise.
By the time Clinton began his campaign for a fifth term, which would make him the longest-tenured governor in Arkansas history, he was such a large, familiar figure in the state that he faced the ultimate political paradox. His self-image had always been one of action and change, yet now, inevitably, he had come to represent permanence and stability. He was approaching a potential fatal point where polls showed that he was more popular than electable: more people gave him a high approval rating than wanted to vote for him. His opponent in the Democratic primary, a liberal policy analyst named Tom McRae, played on this mood with an anti-Clinton ad that showed a line of clocks stretching into infinity. Clinton’s campaign was burdened with a sense that he was stretching his time in office. Many of his longtime county chairs were exhausted from the permanent campaign and unprepared for another grueling round. Gloria Cabe, who had taken over as campaign manager for Betsey Wright, had to recruit an almost entirely new network of workers. Wright felt that Cabe had betrayed her by taking the job. Dick Morris, an ally of Wright’s, would not deal with Cabe and kept pestering Clinton to rehire Wright. Cabe wanted nothing to do with Morris and was furious that Clinton and Hillary still dealt with a political operative whose other clients were Republicans.
One day at the Governor’s Mansion, after a meeting of Clinton, Hillary, Cabe, and Morris, the relationship between the governor and his consultant exploded. Clinton was on edge, worried that he had made a mistake by entering the race. Morris was hounding Clinton about his treatment of Betsey Wright. They got into a shouting match near the side porch, with Morris, nearly a foot shorter than the governor, screaming up into his face. As Hillary and Cabe stood by, Clinton suddenly lost control, according to Cabe, and slugged Morris, sending him reeling. “Clinton apologized,” Cabe later recalled. “But he was still pissed.” Morris did not resign. He stayed on for the rest of the campaign, though every now and then, according to Cabe, he would mutter, “I can’t believe Clinton hit me!”
The most memorable moment in the primary came when Tom McRae held a press conference at the Capitol and Hillary started heckling him from the back of the crowd. “Get off it, Tom!” she shouted, as McRae criticized Clinton’s record. It had the feel of a spontaneous encounter, the proud wife defending her man. In fact, it had been scripted. At a strategy meeting the day before, the Clinton team had decided that McRae needed to be confronted. “We have to take this guy on!” Hillary had said, and then she went out and did it. What effect it had is a matter of dispute. McRae later claimed that he won the rural women’s vote because of it. But Clinton won the primary.
In the general election, Clinton faced Republican Sheffield Nelson, a former Democrat who ran Arkansas-Louisiana Gas Company, the state’s largest gas utility. During Clinton’s first term, he and Nelson had been allies. “If Sheffield Nelson called the office, he was talking to Bill Clinton,” former aide Randy White recalled of those early days. “If Nelson wanted Bill Clinton in his office, he would be there.” They had several mutual friends, including Clinton’s childhood pal, Mack McLarty, who would succeed Nelson at Arkla, but over the years Clinton and Nelson grew to hate each other. They both came out of small-town Arkansas, Nelson with an even more deprived background than Clinton. They were competitive, ambitious, complicated men who enjoyed nothing more than gathering rumors and private reports on the other’s actions and then spreading the word around town. There was enough material on both sides to keep the gossip flowing. It was a private war conducted at a level beneath the public campaign.
Clinton had reinforced his general election team with outsiders, including Frank Greer, a Washington-based media consultant, and pollster Stanley Greenberg, an expert on the use of focus groups. Greer had long considered Clinton presidential material and viewed the gubernatorial race as a warmup for 1992. In recruiting Greer, in fact, Clinton had said, “You always wanted me to run for president. But let me tell you, if I lose this race for governor, I’ll never get elected dog catcher.” Not long after Greer signed on, Clinton attended a debate at which he was asked whether if he won the election he would serve out his full term as governor. “You bet,” he said impulsively.
Cabe called Greer from the debate. “You’re not going to like this,” she said. “Clinton just took himself out of the ’92 race.”
Greer was shocked. “We had talked a lot about running for president,” he recalled. “I died a thousand deaths. I thought perhaps it wasn’t going to happen. I was bound and determined to tell him to run in 1992.”
Clinton remained comfortably ahead during the final month of the campaign. In response to the findings of Greenberg’s focus groups, he had repositioned himself as the agent of change, with a new agenda for his next term that concentrated on middle-class concerns. The strategy was effective, but every day in October it seemed that the contest got nastier. Calls were streaming into the campaign office about Clinton’s extramarital sex life. On October 19, Larry Nichols, a former employee of the Arkansas Development Finance Agency, held a press conference announcing that he was filing a lawsuit against Clinton in which he contended that the governor had used a slush fund to entertain at least five women with whom he had affairs. Nichols offered no proof, and the Arkansas press declined to write about the suit or the press conference. Nichols was a familiar character to the local press. He had been fired from the state agency in 1988 after it was discovered that he had made 142 long-distance telephone calls at taxpayer expense to leaders of the Nicaraguan contra movement. Although Nelson maintained that he had no connection to the Nichols lawsuit and the allegations about Clinton’s sex life, workers at his campaign headquarters spread the story to anyone who called.
According to Nelson’s campaign manager, Paula Unruh, they had taped a commercial attacking Clinton’s personal character but decided not to run it. Instead, during the final days of the campaign, they ran another negative ad portraying Clinton as a big-tax liberal. What has Clinton done and what will he do if he is reelected? the spot asked. The answer, “Raise and spend, raise and spend,” was delivered in Clinton’s voice, taken out of context from his 1989 state of the state address.
At eleven o’clock on Saturday night of the final weekend before the election, Dick Morris was at a tavern in Westchester County, New York, and about to leave for his home in Connecticut when he decided to call the firm in Atlanta that was doing the tracking polls for Clinton. With Clinton apparently ahead by 15 percentage points, Morris did not consider the final tracking poll a matter of urgency, and acknowledged later that he had it done “just to make it look good as much as anything else.” But when he reached the people in Atlanta, they told him that Clinton had fallen 10 points in three days and was now down to 46 percent. According to Morris, the open-ended question on the poll that asked people what they liked least about Clinton showed that Nelson’s tax ads were having a profound effect. It was well past midnight when he called Clinton at the mansion and gave him the numbers. “I knew it! I knew I was getting killed by that ad!” Morris recalled Clinton saying. “I can feel it!”
From that point, Morris said, Clinton reacted “as clearheaded as a quarterback under a rush.” They wrote a response ad overnight and produced it early the following morning. The response noted that Nelson had misappropriated Clinton’s state of the state message by lifting the words “raise and spend” from a paragraph that in fact was a criticism of the Reagan administration. To pay for the ads, Clinton took out another personal loan from one of the banks that helped him fund the permanent campaign, the Bank of Perry County, which was owned by Herbie Branscum, a longtime Clinton ally and former chairman of the state Democratic party. Television station managers around the state were called and persuaded to take the response ads immediately and run them Sunday and Monday. Gloria Cabe recruited her teenage daughter to serve as the delivery woman. She and a pilot flew around the state in a thunderstorm to get the tapes to the stations. Another team of volunteer drivers carried the audio responses to dozens of radio stations.
Clinton defeated Nelson handily that Tuesday, so easily, in fact, that Cabe wondered whether Morris’s final poll could have been accurate. When Morris called her and asked for his payment for the poll, she said she would not give it to him until he provided her with the detailed results. She never got the results, she said later, and she never wrote Morris the check.
ONE day in December, in the month after the election, Clinton called Gennifer Flowers, one of the women who had been named in the Nichols lawsuit. Clinton did not know that Flowers was tape-recording their conversation. They talked about the lawsuit and Sheffield Nelson. “I stuck it up their ass,” Clinton said. “Nelson called afterwards, you know.” He said that Nelson had claimed that he had nothing to do with the infidelity allegations. “I know he lied. I just wanted to make his asshole pucker,” Clinton said to Flowers. “But I covered you….”
When AP reporter Bill Simmons had first called him and read him the list, Clinton told Flowers, his response was, “God… I kinda hate to deny that!” He had good taste, Clinton told her. Then he added: “I told you a couple of years ago, one time when I came to see you, that I had retired. And I’m now glad I have because they scoured the waterfront.”
AS Ed Howard was moving through the crowd at Oaklawn race track in Hot Springs on Derby Day, April 20, 1991, he saw Governor Clinton approaching from the other direction. Howard was a real estate agent in Malvern. He was a Clinton supporter. He had known Clinton since the summer of 1969, when he served as a drill instructor for the ROTC unit at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He was there when Clinton had signed up for the reserve program as a means of avoiding the draft, and he had been there when Clinton’s letter to Colonel Holmes arrived from Oxford. Nearly ten years later, when Clinton was in his first campaign for governor, Howard had received a call from a Republican political operative who wanted him to go public with his knowledge of Clinton’s actions to avert the draft. Howard had declined. Now another decade had passed, Clinton seemed to be on the verge of running for president, and the questions were coming again. Howard was being pursued by a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette who had heard from an ex-student in Fayetteville about the possible existence of a controversial letter from young Bill Clinton concerning the draft. The reporter had called Howard several times. It was the first thing that crossed Howard’s mind when he saw Clinton at Derby Day. Maybe, he thought, he should tell the governor.
They shook hands and chatted a minute, and then Howard said that a reporter was on the trail of the letter and the draft.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Clinton. “I’ve put that one to bed.”
“Okay,” said Howard.
There was a pause, and then Clinton asked, “What did you tell ’em?”
“Nothing,” said Howard.
“Good,” Clinton said.
LESS than three weeks later, on the morning of May 6 at a convention hall in Cleveland, Ohio, Clinton walked to the podium to give the keynote address at the national meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The session had generated controversy even before it began, with the decision to exclude Jesse Jackson from the list of speakers. Clinton, as the president of the DLC, had taken the brunt of Jackson’s wrath, along with a few sharp criticisms from Ron Brown, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. As Clinton prepared to speak, he took out a single piece of paper that had twenty words scratched on it. From those one-word cues he delivered what many in the audience regarded as the finest political speech of the year. “We’re here to save the United States of America,” he declared, not just the Democratic party. “Our burden is to give the people a new choice rooted in old values. A new choice that is simple, that offers opportunity, demands responsibility, gives citizens more say, provides them responsive government, all because we recognize that we are community. We’re all in this together, and we’re going up or down together.” The buzz in Washington among journalists and political opinion makers was that the Cleveland speech had established Clinton as a serious national figure, one who seemed to have a clear idea of what he wanted to do as president.
Two days later, back in Little Rock, Clinton made an appearance at the Governor’s Quality Conference in a ballroom at the Excelsior Hotel. Paula Corbin Jones, then a twenty-four-year-old secretary for the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, which was sponsoring the conference, was working at the reception desk outside the ballroom. According to an account she would give three years later, which Clinton denies, the governor stared at her as he stood nearby, and then later dispatched one of his state troopers to solicit her. Handing her a piece of paper with a room number on it, the trooper, according to her account, said that Clinton wanted to meet her in his room. She said that she went out of curiosity. Inside the room, she said, Clinton kissed her on the neck, placed a hand on her thigh, said that he liked the curves of her body and the flow of her hair, turned “beet red,” and asked her to perform a sex act. She refused, she said, and quickly left.
IN June and July, Clinton talked to scores of friends about whether he should run for president. He could present a convincing case either way, as he always could. One of his arguments on the negative side had echoes of 1987. He would say that he was not sure that Chelsea was ready. There was a new problem as well: his promise to the voters of Arkansas that he would serve out his term as governor. Hillary seemed not merely ready this time, but eager, as were most of their friends. On August 14, Hillary Clinton went up to Bentonville for a meeting of the Wal-Mart environmental board, which she chaired. Texas Land Commissioner Garry Mauro, and Roy Spence, head of an Austin advertising firm, were also there. They had known Clinton and Rodharn since the McGovern campaign in Texas in 1972. Now Mauro was on the Wal-Mart environmental board with Hillary, and Spence had the company’s advertising account. After the meeting, Hillary turned to Spence, who had rented a car, and said, “Let’s drive around.” Spence drove aimlessly. Mauro sat in the back and Hillary in front. “We’re thinking about doing it,” Hillary said. “We’re thinking about going forward with this great adventure. What do you all think?”
“This is what we’ve been waiting for, for a long time,” Spence said.
Hillary said there were some problems and she needed their advice. “Bill made a contract with the people of Arkansas to not run and he’s really worried about it,” she said.
Spence said it was important to “lance that boil.”
How? asked Hillary.
“Your enemies will hold it against you, but your friends don’t have to,” Spence said. “They’ll want you to run. Get in the car and drive around Arkansas and seek the counsel of the family members.”
They drove around for another half-hour, and then Spence circled back to the Wal-Mart parking lot and turned off the engine. “You know, Roy, they’ll say a lot of things about our marriage,” Hillary said.
“Yeah.”
“What should we do about that?”
“Admit it. Early.”
A few days later, Clinton drove around Arkansas in what was called “The Secret Tour.” In town after town, he told supporters that he felt troubled about breaking his pledge to serve out his term. Everywhere he went, people told him to run. He was participating in a well-scripted skit. Not long after he finished, he announced the formation of an exploratory committee, the first formal step on the way toward an announcement. The next three steps were taken in sequence when the Clintons visited Washington in mid-September. First, in a day-long session chaired by Mickey Kantor in a meeting room at the Washington Court Hotel, they met with about twenty political friends and allies and plotted the strategy and mechanics of a campaign: what issues to emphasize, how to put together a staff and raise money. Kantor gingerly broached the subject of how Clinton intended to deal with questions about infidelity.
That subject got a more thorough vetting later at a meeting in Frank Greer’s office attended by a smaller group that included the Clintons, Bruce Lindsey, Greer, and Stan Greenberg. In dealing with reporters and political operatives all summer, Greer had come to realize that Clinton had “an incredible reputation around town” for philandering. The next morning, Clinton was scheduled to meet the elite of Washington’s political press corps at a traditional function known as the Sperling Breakfast, founded by Godfrey Sperling, Jr., of the Christian Science Monitor. What should he do, if anything, to assure this crowd that his personal life was under control, that he would not implode like Gary Hart? The mention of the subject irked Clinton. The rules had changed since Hart, he said. Now there was so much hypocrisy involved. If you just go out and divorce your wife, you never have to deal with this. But if you work at your problems, if you make a commitment, then you do. So people are rewarded in politics if they divorce their wives. That was the genesis of the answer they decided Clinton should give at the Sperling Breakfast. He would say that he had had some problems, but that he and Hillary worked things through and they were committed to their marriage.
Clinton and Hillary left for dinner. When Clinton came back a few hours later, he told Greer, “Hell, I just had dinner with Vernon Jordan and Jordan said, ‘Screw ’em! Don’t tell ’em anything!’”
That probably would not work, Clinton was told.
The next morning, before the breakfast, Greer encouraged several reporters to ask a question about Clinton’s sex life. No one seemed eager to do it. Finally, as the session was nearing an end, the question came up. Clinton replied that it was the sort of trivia that people obsessed about while Rome was in decline. But on this occasion, with Hillary at his side, he added: “Like nearly anybody who has been together for twenty years, our relationship has not been perfect or free from difficulties, but we feel good about where we are and we believe in our obligation to each other, and we intend to be together thirty or forty years from now, whether I run for president or not.”
IN the early morning of October 3, Clinton, in his jogging shorts and shoes, headed down the mansion driveway and out the gate, heading north through his neighborhood of Victorian homes and across the bridge over 1-630 into the quiet downtown. The streets counted down as he ran, past Tenth and Ninth and Eighth and Seventh and Sixth and Fifth and Fourth and Third and Second, until he arrived at East Markham Street, one block from the Arkansas River. He loped past the Old State House. In a few short hours, at noon, he would stand there, on a platform framed by twelve American flags and four grand white columns, and say the words he could not bring himself to say four years earlier, words that he had wanted to say for so long.
He had been up until at least two-thirty the night before, sitting at his oversized chair in the breakfast nook next to the kitchen, making telephone calls, nibbling on a banana with peanut butter spread on it, working through the final drafts of his speech with a team of writers: Bruce Reed from the DLC, pollster Greenberg, consultant Greer, and the author Tommy Caplan, his friend from Georgetown. Now the speech was typed and printed, and Greer had already slipped embargoed copies to the wire services, hoping that he could thereby prevent Clinton from making too many of his last-minute revisions. Greer and Reed were waiting for him when he returned from his jog. It looked beautiful down there at the Old State House, he told them. With Clinton still sweating in his running clothes, Greer positioned him in front of a portable bar, which they pretended was a podium, and had him rehearse the speech. His allergies were flaring and they worried about his voice. The speech seemed too long; they cut several lines. The last thing Clinton wanted was to remind anyone that he was the guy whose most famous speech prompted members of the audience to chant: “Get the hook!”
At eleven-thirty, everyone was ready to go except Clinton. He was in his room, rummaging through his closet, searching for a tie that looked presidential. He settled on one that was dark blue with diagonal stripes.
It was a glorious high autumn day, clear and golden. The crowd gathering in front of the Old State House was in a festive mood. There were a few thousand people there, legislators, state workers, curious onlookers, staff members, friends. As Diane Blair approached the black iron gate leading onto the lawn, she stopped for a moment. There on the sidewalk in front of her stood Orval Faubus, symbol of the Old South, an ancient and lonely man, reduced to a sideshow, hawking one of his books. A television crew swept past, oblivious of the old governor’s presence. History rises, Blair thought, and history rejects.
Clinton gave a speech that lasted thirty-two minutes, the precise length of his ill-fated address in Atlanta. Few complained. No red lights flashed. He mentioned the middle class twelve times. He recalled the lasting message of his favorite professor at Georgetown, Carroll Quigley, who said that America was the greatest country in history because it was rooted in the belief that the future would be better than the present. He talked about how his grandparents had taken care of him while his mother was away at nursing school. He said that southerners had been divided by race for too long. Twice he evoked John F. Kennedy. He delivered his New Democrat riffs on opportunity and responsibility and how he favored change that was neither liberal nor conservative but both and different. But there was one line in the speech that had been the easiest to write and that he now proclaimed with the most energy and emotion. It was the first line of the twenty-third paragraph. It went: “That is why today I am declaring my candidacy for President of the United States.”
His mother was there to hear him say those words. She had been waiting to hear them since he was a boy. She was the one who had taught him how to block things out and keep going through tough times. She gave him his perseverance and his optimism. Now she was determined to play out one final act of will. Four months earlier, her doctor had told her that her breast cancer had spread and that she was dying. She had not told her son. She hoped not to tell him until he was president of the United States.
Carolyn Staley and David Leopoulos were nearby, amid a group of special guests in a front-row section cordoned off with a golden rope. The two friends from Hot Springs were overwhelmed when Clinton finished speaking and stood on the podium with Hillary and Chelsea. They were so close to him that they could reach out and touch his feet, yet they felt oddly further from him than ever before. All three Clintons had tears in their eyes and Leopoulos thought they looked “scared to death,” as though they had stepped past a point of no return.
Tommy Caplan, Clinton’s Georgetown roommate, lingered off to the side, thinking back to their senior year in college, before Robert Kennedy was killed, when he and his friend both believed it was possible for a politician to heal a country.
Bob Reich had flown down to Little Rock that morning, unexpected, and stood under the shade of a column as he listened. When he noticed the tear in Chelsea’s eye, he became overtaken by emotion himself and thought, “I just hope to God they know what they’re getting into.” At that moment, he would say later, he had a vision that he was witnessing a momentous occasion “in an extreme and classic sense of momentous.” His vision was that his old Rhodes pal at Univ College would be elected president. He left for the airport soon after the speech, without even letting Clinton know that he had been there, and flew back to Cambridge, where, once again using Strobe Talbott as his foil, he would write in the annual class letter: “Bill Clinton’s candidacy makes Strobe Talbott feel old. However, the prospect that all of us will flock to Washington when Bill wins makes him feel good.”
Carl Wagner, who had spent several hours talking to Clinton and Hillary on the eve of his decision not to run four years earlier, had a sensation similar to Reich’s. He thought back two decades to the summer of 1970 when he and Clinton walked up to Capitol Hill to try to persuade congressmen to cut off funds for the Vietnam War. Here, finally, is the day, Wagner thought. Here is the day for their generation.
Diane Blair looked up at Hillary, with her rich red suit and brilliant red lipstick, her face made up and her hair coiffeured, and remembered their days as young professors in Fayetteville. She grinned to herself, Blair recalled, as she thought back to the era when Hillary “had looked so much less glamorous.” Then she felt a chill. It is different, she thought. Nothing will ever be the same.
Betsey Wright could not bring herself to drive over to the Old State House. After devoting a decade of her life to Clinton’s political advancement, she was feeling demoralized about him again. With Clinton’s help and encouragement, she had reentered the political world in late 1990 and become the head of the state Democratic party. But one month before Clinton’s announcement, their reconciliation had collapsed in a bitter misunderstanding over money, she had been trying to raise it for the state party and felt that he had directly competed with her by soliciting funds for the DLC. The dispute had prompted her to quit as director of the state party. While Clinton was announcing for president, thanking his friends for “filling my life full of blessings beyond anything I ever deserved,” Wright was back at her house on Hill Street, alone.
Cliff Jackson was also at home in Little Rock, sitting at his desk, his television tuned to the speech. Jackson, who had first met Clinton when they played basketball together at Oxford, had been following his fellow Arkansan’s political rise with dismay and a sense of inevitability. He had distrusted Clinton since the summer of 1969, when he thought that Clinton had manipulated him in an effort to avert the military draft. He had been mostly silent about it for decades, but no more. He and several conservative associates had just formed an anti-Clinton group called the Alliance for Rebirth of an Independent America. They were raising money to fund newspaper and radio commercials attacking Clinton’s record. The first one ran in the Arkansas Democrat on this morning of the announcement. Now Jackson, a lawyer, was spending his lunch hour alone in his den, watching his long-ago rival declare that he was a candidate for president. “I’ve always known that we would come to this time and place,” Jackson said to himself. “I’ve always known.”
When the cheering stopped, Clinton and his family entered the Old State House for a small reception. Chelsea took a place in line, and when she reached the front she shook her father’s hand and said, “Congratulations, that was a fine speech, Governor.” Clinton spent several hours that afternoon shaking hands at a larger reception at the Excelsior. There were more receptions that night back at the mansion. By eleven, Hillary was tired and ready for bed. Clinton stayed up with a small band of friends who had gathered around Carolyn Staley at the piano. They sang a medley of Motown songs, followed by “Abraham, Martin and John,” the anthem to political martyrs. Clinton sat beside Carolyn on the bench and sang every verse. He knew all the words.
Soon the room fell quiet as Carolyn played the opening chords to her friend’s favorite hymn. It was approaching midnight on the first day of his campaign for president and William Jefferson Clinton was in full voice. “A-a-ma-zing grace!” he sang. “How sweet the sound. That saved a-a wretch like me. I-I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind, but now I see.”