by Keith Boykin
William Jefferson Clinton was born in the small town of Hope, Arkansas, in the segregated South of 1946. In a contrast to the pampered upbringing of the man he would ultimately defeat for president in 1992, Clinton grew up in a troubled household with an alcoholic stepfather. He worked his way up to Georgetown University, a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, a degree from Yale Law School, and an election to attorney general of Arkansas at only thirty years old. In 1978, Clinton won his first governor’s race and was elected again in 1982, in the same year my candidate, George Sheldon, lost his race for Congress in Florida. Particularly impressive was the fact that, as Ronald Reagan won his forty-nine-state victory in 1984, Clinton had still managed to win reelection against his Republican challenger by a 25-percentage point margin, even though Reagan would easily carry his state and the rest of the South. While Democrats were repeatedly losing national presidential elections and slowly losing ground in the former Confederate states, Clinton continued winning his elections in Arkansas in 1986 and 1990.
With his youthful good looks, boyish charm, and an accomplished and outspoken wife, everything about Clinton’s style and demeanor seemed to represent a change from the old conservative ways of the Reagan-Bush era. As a sixteen-year-old high school student, Clinton had been photographed shaking the hand of President John F. Kennedy at the White House in 1963, and this image came to represent a passing of the torch from one generation to the next. Just as Kennedy had been the first American president born in the twentieth century, Clinton hoped to become the first president born after World War II. He became, in the skillful hands of the marketing gurus, “the man from Hope.” This Kennedyesque appeal allowed the forty-six-year-old governor to inspire various factions of the Democratic Party, but it was his record of defying the political odds that impressed those who were most desperate to win back the White House. The Clinton campaign billed the candidate as “a different kind of Democrat” with a Yankee education and a Dixie background, who could talk to Northerners and Southerners, who was fluent with Black and white audiences, and who could appeal to liberals and conservatives.
Many of the liberal Democrats who had concerns about Clinton came to embrace his candidacy and the early years of his presidency with a bit of a wink and a nod. The man could “feel your pain” and communicate his support for your interests or constituency almost telepathically, and his supporters became witting coconspirators in the plot. We knew, or thought we knew, that Clinton could not say everything we wanted him to say in support of our liberal causes, so we gave him wide latitude because we thought he was on our side and trying his best to defeat our common adversaries. As a result, when he endorsed policies with which we disagreed, some of us were often far too forgiving of his transgressions.
Black Americans also fell prey to this trap. Many of us liked Bill Clinton and wanted him to succeed. Almost from the beginning, there was something about him that distinguished him from his rivals. None of the other 1992 Democratic primary candidates appealed to Black Americans in a way that Clinton did. Former California governor Jerry Brown was seen as sort of a bohemian long shot. Former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas came across as an aloof intellectual. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin was a populist favorite, but he, like Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, appealed more to whites in middle America, and both represented states with very few Black people. Of all the candidates, Clinton had the strongest natural connection to Black voters. He was the youngest candidate in the field, the only sitting governor and the only Southerner, and he had an ability to “code switch”—he could speak the Queen’s English to policy wonks and then turn around and talk like “Bubba” to the “good ol’ boys” in the South—that could be comforting or troubling, depending on your perspective. His Southern heritage also gave him a proximity to Black culture that white politicians from Iowa and Nebraska tend to lack. When he played his saxophone on the popular Arsenio Hall Show in the summer of 1992, Black voters interpreted his gesture—which today would be dismissed as performative pandering—as a genuine effort to relate to our community. Before Clinton, we had never seen a presidential nominee for a major political party who seemed to understand or appreciate Black culture or Black music. Most previous Democratic presidential nominees obligatorily made the rounds, showing up to NAACP conventions and Black churches and visiting all the usual suspects. Clinton went beyond those traditional spaces, and he understood one truth in 1992 that future candidates from his party would fail to recognize as late as 2020—modern Democrats can’t win the presidency without winning and inspiring the Black vote.
Part of Clinton’s success was his familiar background. Southern culture had long been intimately connected to Black culture. The food and drinks, the accents and dialects, even the speaking styles of pastors and politicians bore similarities derived from centuries of interrelatedness. The most gifted white politicians in the South could communicate to Black audiences with a sense of cultural familiarity. Black voters in the South rewarded these colorful politicians, like Democrat Edwin Edwards, the flamboyant, scandal-plagued white Cajun, who could speak at a homecoming for Black students and alumni at Southern University, kiss the Black homecoming queen, and march off to cheers as the band played. When he ran against Republican David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan (KKK) Grand Wizard, during Louisiana’s 1991 gubernatorial race, Edwards wryly noted, “The only thing we have in common is we’re both wizards under the sheets.”
Bill Clinton represented a new, Northern-educated generation of that Southern Democratic tradition, fully capable of charming audiences from Hampton University in Virginia to Harvard University in Massachusetts. I witnessed his skills firsthand when I returned from a US trade mission to Zimbabwe in the summer of 1997, and Reverend Jesse Jackson walked our entire delegation across the tarmac to greet Clinton for an unplanned meeting as he boarded Air Force One. Without prompting, Clinton greeted every member of the nearly all-Black delegation by name. It did not surprise me that he knew leaders like Jackson, Coretta Scott King, Dorothy Height, and David Dinkins, who were on the trip. Nor was I surprised that he knew his own transportation secretary, Rodney Slater (although President Reagan once failed to recognize his only Black cabinet member, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Samuel Pierce, in 1981). Clinton also knew George Haley, a lawyer who worked on the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case and was the brother of Roots author Alex Haley. And he knew Michael Brown, whose father, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, had died in a plane crash on a similar trade mission to Croatia the year before. He knew every person on the tarmac, and he knew something about each person’s background. As for me, by 1997, I had left the White House to work for a nonprofit organization and doubted I had made a huge impression on somebody as busy as the president. But Clinton didn’t miss a beat. “Good to see you again, Keith.”
Bill Clinton was the only politician I’ve ever met who could look in the eyes of almost anyone he met—Black or white, straight or gay, male or female—and make them feel that he cared about them. It reminded me of the first time I saw him work his magic the day I walked from my Cambridge apartment at 29 Garden Street to see him speak at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in October of 1991. At the end of his prepared remarks, a student in the audience asked a question. If elected, would you lift the ban on gays and lesbians serving in the military? Clinton said he would.
The answer surprised me. I had not expected that from a white Baptist Southern Democratic politician in 1991. Clinton’s position was far more progressive than the “Massachusetts liberal” I worked for in 1988. In the final three months I traveled with Dukakis on the campaign trail, watching every single speech he delivered, I cannot recall a single instance in which he even mentioned lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning or queer (LGBTQ) people. While Jesse Jackson had consciously included gays and lesbians in his Rainbow Coalition during his 1984 and 1988 campaigns, no Democratic nominee for president had ever publicly endorsed federal action to protect LGBTQ people from discriminati
on in the military. Clinton’s position marked a sea change for Democrats and a recognition that the party that had become associated with civil rights for Blacks would soon be associated with civil rights for other oppressed groups as well. By the end of the campaign, every 1992 Democratic presidential candidate endorsed the idea of lifting the ban on gays in the military. That was a stunning development for a cautious political party, but as for Clinton, it made me believe he was actually a liberal in conservative Southern clothing. Prior to that day, I preferred Paul Tsongas, primarily because he had graduated from Dartmouth, as had I. But Tsongas never inspired me as a candidate. After Clinton’s speech that afternoon, I knew he would be the Democratic nominee.
My perception of Clinton had come to be shaped by an emerging aspect of my young identity that added a new dimension to my racial consciousness. I was a second-year student in law school when I first started to understand and appreciate my sexual orientation. After weeks of reflection and journaling, I walked into a bookstore in Harvard Square one day and searched for a book to help me understand and articulate what I was feeling. Nervously looking over my shoulder, I thumbed through the books in the gay and lesbian section until I found one that I wanted to buy. I discreetly carried the book to the counter, purchased it, and slipped it into my backpack to take home. That night, instead of reading for my classes, I read that entire book, and for the first time in my life, at twenty-five years old, I knew I was gay.
That discovery gave me a new sense of intersectional awareness of how racism operates and overlaps with other prejudices that I had never fully appreciated. I took a course on sexual orientation in the law and realized that many of the legal arguments used to justify discrimination against the LGBTQ community in the 1990s—religious freedom, consumer preference, unit cohesion—were identical to the legal arguments used to justify discrimination against African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. As my early thinking evolved, I came to see sexual orientation issues as a useful but imperfect indicator of how straight white politicians would approach sensitive race issues. If they were afraid to think deeply about sexual orientation, they probably could not be trusted to do so when it came to race. And if politicians could not be relied on to defend the basic concept of nondiscrimination toward gays in the military, I decided, they probably could not be relied on to defend the concept of affirmative action for African Americans, either. Both were sensitive subjects for those who were wary of a changing America, and both would require leadership and education to persuade the public.
A year and a half after Clinton’s Harvard speech, I sat with him in the Oval Office as he took part in a historic first-ever meeting with leaders of the nation’s largest LGBTQ organizations. It was April 1993, and I had become one of the two highest-ranking openly gay people in the White House. It would have been an unlikely place for me to be just two years earlier, when I walked into the Harvard Square bookstore to discover my own identity. But as sure as I was changing and adapting to new circumstances, the world around me was struggling to catch up. Three months before that historic meeting, a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent called me into his office on the fifth floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a follow-up interview to my background check. We have reason to believe that you may be leading an alternative lifestyle, the agent said. “Alternative to what?” I asked, knowing exactly what he meant. The clearly uncomfortable agent told me he had uncovered evidence that I might be gay. This was hardly a secret, and I wondered why the FBI hadn’t discovered this information earlier. Then I wondered why it was even a question. Apparently, undisclosed sexual orientation creates opportunities for potential blackmail or extortion, I was told. I suppose that makes sense, but my sexual orientation was not something I had hidden in my interview with the White House. Nobody ever asked. I assumed it was not an issue for a young new president who had pledged to hire gays and lesbians in the federal government and to build an administration “that looks like America.”
Clinton kept his commitment in hiring and appointments, but he broke his promise in more substantive matters. In public, Clinton professed continued support for his pledge to lift the ban on gays in the military, but behind closed doors, the White House sought to make the issue go away. The groundswell of opposition to Clinton’s proposal caught the new administration off guard. It had barely registered as an issue in the fall campaign, but opponents of the plan began organizing against it the moment Clinton won. Once elected, questions about “gays in the military” seemed to intrigue the media even more than Clinton’s economic proposals, and those questions threatened to overwhelm the president’s broader agenda on jobs and health care.
It was still not clear how Clinton planned to carry out his promise when he sat down in the White House with the eight LGBTQ leaders that afternoon in April 1993. Asked a question about his legacy, Clinton said he thought he would be remembered in history for two things: health care reform and lifting the ban on gays in the military. But, as history would unfold, he would accomplish neither of these two goals.
It did not help that conservative Southern Democrats like Georgia Senator Sam Nunn joined with Republicans in objecting to any change in military policy that might undermine “unit cohesion.” Nunn even went so far as to stage an elaborate photo opportunity with thirty reporters on board a submarine at Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia to demonstrate “the very close quarters.” The opinions of the sailors he spoke to that day were mixed, but the impact of the visual image was unmistakable. The next day, a four-column, above-the-fold photo of Nunn and Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia, bending down to talk to sailors in the lower section of a cramped bunk bed, appeared on the front page of the New York Times. It was just a few weeks after Clinton’s historic meeting, and Nunn had successfully deployed the same scare tactics that segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond had unsuccessfully used to oppose the integration of the armed forces in 1948.
The Clinton administration’s inability to lift the ban on gays in the military was a colossal failure that all of us should have seen coming, and it would become emblematic of a larger problem for the new administration. As the early media focus on gays in the military seemed to eclipse other important issues that the new administration hoped to tackle, the senior White House staff became increasingly wary of the discussion. One day, when White House aide Rahm Emanuel complained in a morning meeting that reporters only wanted to talk about “fags in the foxhole,” I began to question whether my colleagues shared my ideological beliefs.
For some time, I had naively assumed the president would keep the promise he made when I saw him speak at the Kennedy School. But I should have known he was retreating from that pledge the day in March of 1993 when I stood in the back of the East Room of the White House and watched him answer a question at a news conference. Asked if he would consider a proposal to segregate gay and lesbian troops in the armed forces, Clinton responded: “I wouldn’t rule that out, depending on what the grounds and arguments were.” I couldn’t believe it. Any talk of segregating troops was sure to enrage activists and prompt memories of the military segregating African Americans before 1948, but it seemed as if the president and senior staff had no idea his response would provoke a controversy. That’s when I volunteered to work on the team to communicate the president’s efforts to the community.
I believed in Bill Clinton, and I assumed I could make a positive impact on the policy he chose and help to communicate it more effectively to the community. In my new unofficial capacity, I spoke almost daily with LGBTQ leaders as the White House and the Defense Department studied the military issue to determine how to implement the plan. Then, early one morning in July 1993, the phone rang in my apartment, and I woke up to a surprise. It was Air Force One telling me that I had a call from George Stephanopoulos. George was my boss in the White House, and he was on his way back from the G7 summit in Tokyo with President Clinton. He asked me to prepare a memo to the president outlining all the public statem
ents he had made about gays in the military. I was told to deliver it as soon as possible. I got up, rushed to the office, and began researching and writing the memo, determined that my words would somehow influence the outcome of the policy debate and persuade the president to carry out his original promise.
But my memo made no difference, and the president announced his “compromise” proposal just days later. The policy was called “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue.” The military would stop asking enlistees about their sexual orientation, and, in return, gay and lesbian troops could remain in the armed forces as long as they didn’t talk about it, either. It was not the policy the LGBTQ community wanted nor the policy that Clinton had promised, and yet I somehow allowed myself to believe that it was the best he could do—that it was a noble compromise in difficult circumstances. It was not the plan I wanted, but it was a step in the right direction on the path toward a full repeal of the ban.
Looking back, I can’t believe I actually thought that. Almost immediately, the policy was ridiculed and condemned by both sides. Liberals saw it as a betrayal of Clinton’s promise, and conservatives saw it as a sign of hostility against traditional American values. Yet, it would take me months to recognize the dangerous precedent established by the policy. And, as the military continued to violate the spirit of the agreement by discharging gay and lesbian service members over the course of the coming years, it would eventually become painfully obvious that the compromise was wholly unworkable.