Denise Hyland enjoyed watching her boyfriend portray himself as “a simple southern guy coming to the brave new world of the East Coast.” She knew that part of it was true: he was enough of a hokey razorback to walk around campus wearing a bright red V-neck vest hand-knitted for him by a relative. But it was also partly a ruse, a way for him to lure people into underestimating him. He would play that just-a-humble-southern-boy game, teasingly, even with Denise’s mother. He sent her a note that year after a visit thanking her for letting Denise drive him to the airport in New York—“A small price to pay,” he wrote with mock self-ridicule, “to get rid of the southern plague.” Later, when he learned that Denise would be working as an intern at an export-import firm in the financial district the next summer, he wrote Mrs. Hyland another self-effacing, pun-filled note: “Take care of Miss Financial District. Make sure she doesn’t become an ‘export’ to someone of ‘import.’ I wouldn’t have a prayer—oh yes, even Baptists have those.”
THE times were changing rapidly on college campuses by the spring of 1966, but still not at Georgetown, which remained decidedly mainstream, all beer and no drugs. War protests on campus amounted to fifteen or twenty peaceful souls holding vigils near the statue of Georgetown founder John Carroll. The editorialists in The Courier maintained their prowar position, arguing: “American withdrawal at the present time is absurd. We are a world power engaged in a world struggle and the liberal neo-isola-tionists among us should realize the need for effective use of this power if our position and their liberties are to be maintained.” Some students were starting to worry about the military draft, however, as the troop numbers in Vietnam increased. “All males harbor fears over the Armed Forces Qualification Test,” one Hoya columnist wrote. “Fear not, we have the solutions: Poke out right ear drum; kiss your Army recruiter; shave your legs during the physical; burn your best friend’s draft card; become one of George Hamilton’s buddies; get religious convictions, or for that matter criminal ones will do; finally, if all else fails, enlist. Patriots never pass physicals.”
Clinton and Tom Campbell enlisted that spring of their sophomore year in a fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega, which served as both social club and service organization and was especially valuable for a Georgetown politician in that its members were charged with overseeing student elections. There was a modest amount of hazing of pledges, although hazing was officially banned by the administration. Don Pattee, who was Clinton’s “big brother” for the initiation period, made Clinton report to him every day for six weeks and do whatever he ordered: shine his shoes, run errands, craft a fraternity paddle, and run the gauntlet. The initiation rite on Hell Night was held at Pattee’s parents’ house across the Potomac in Arlington. Clinton, Campbell, Shullaw, and the other pledges were blindfolded and herded down to the basement, where they were forced to kneel in the darkness. One by one they were brought upstairs and questioned about their fraternal worthiness. At five in the morning, when Tom Campbell’s turn arrived, he started laughing and could not stop for thirty minutes.
For Easter break, Clinton brought Tommy Caplan home to Hot Springs. Caplan had spent much of that year holed up in his dorm room in Harbin Hall reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and writing short stories of his own, determined that someday he would write the great American novel. They flew out to Little Rock on a garish pink Braniff jet, an appropriately colorful means of transporting the easterner to Arkansas. Caplan had long been impressed by Clinton’s novelistic sense of place, not just his ability to bring Arkansas characters to life through his storytelling, but his eagerness to be part of that story while so many of his classmates were breaking away from their pasts. From here, Clinton’s attachment seemed less odd. Caplan was overwhelmed by the embrace that he, a stranger, felt on that cool but ripe southern evening when they rolled into Hot Springs, the top down on the convertible they had driven from the airport. It was an embrace that made him understand more about his friend than anything he had witnessed at Georgetown. They were on Central Avenue in downtown Hot Springs, waiting at a stoplight, when from the crowd on the sidewalk came the call of welcome to a favorite son: “Hey, Billy Clinton’s home!” All week long, they would turn other corners and the cry would go out: “Hey, Billy Clinton’s home!” To Caplan, it seemed like a film—“the best of an almost vanished America. You had the feeling of real affection and coherent, small-town life.”
The sophomore year ended quietly for Clinton. When the election for junior class offices was held after Easter break, he decided not to run. His friend David Matter entered the race and was elected class president. In temporarily withdrawing from the student political scene, Clinton was following a well-worn political track. Most of the ablest student leaders at Georgetown had served as freshmen and sophomores and then sat out the third year as they prepared for the top job, student council president, as seniors. Furthermore, Bill Clinton was ready to take his first step into the real world of politics back home.
DURING election years in the 1960s, the center of Arkansas politics was the Marion Hotel, long since demolished, which stood on the banks of the Arkansas River just to the east of the Old State House in Little Rock. It was a musty old place, with thick carpets and painted pipes exposed in the hallways, and no air conditioning. Tradition demanded that serious candidates for state offices set up their headquarters there, an address of such prestige that competitors often found themselves on different wings of the same floor or directly above and below each other. One of the ways in which political journalists measured the strength of candidates was to count the number of rooms each had rented at the Marion. When he launched his campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1966, Judge Frank Holt took six rooms on the third floor, twice as many as anyone else.
One sultry morning in early June, Lyda Holt was seated at a desk in the campaign headquarters near an open window in the corner room facing the Old State House, typing a speech she intended to give on her father’s behalf. Lyda was the older of the judge’s two charming daughters, just back from her freshman year at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. She hated to type and was not having a very successful go of it as she worked on the speech. Then “a nice looking young man appeared in front of me, leaned against the window ledge, and said, ‘Would you like me to type that for you?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ That was my introduction to Bill Clinton…. He just kind of waltzed through. He just showed up. He typed the speech—and it came out edited, better than what I wrote.”
In signing up with the Frank Holt campaign that summer, the first full-time campaign adventure of his life, Clinton had relied on family connec-tions. His uncle Raymond Clinton was known as a player in Garland County politics, someone to whom state Democrats would turn for votes and favors. Young Bill was first introduced to the Holt people as “Raymond Clinton’s nephew—a bright boy who goes to school up east.” Holt, the unassuming brother in a powerful political family led by Jack Holt, Sr., who had twice run for governor himself, was the favorite of the Democratic party establishment. Although he was more progressive on civil rights than Orval Faubus, the man he sought to succeed, Holt nonetheless represented the safe choice. People who thought Arkansas was in need of urgent change had a variety of other candidates from whom to choose. There was Republican Winthrop Rockefeller, who had moved to Arkansas in 1953 to repair his personal life in a place where he was unknown. By 1968, fifteen years later, he was leading a GOP resurgence in the traditionally one-party state, promising to sweep away every remnant of the Faubus machine and modernize Arkansas. There was Brooks Hays, the former congressman, who had made a courageous if politically suicidal stand in support of the federal government’s desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. And for rebels on the segregationist side, Jim Johnson, the razorback version of Alabama’s George Wallace, who attacked the Faubus machine from the populist right.
Holt was immediately put on the defensive as the machine candidate. Jim Johnson accused him of being “hand-picked by the big boys,” and in
a phrase that could not be forgotten, belittled the judge as nothing more than a “pleasant vegetable.” Another conservative opponent, orthodontist Dale Alford, said Holt was a passenger on the “Faubus steamroller” driven by the retiring governor’s political enforcer, William J. Smith, who was said to wield the sort of raw power that made legislators straighten up a little when he came into view. If the supposed links to Faubus were not enough, reporters were tipped off that Holt had met privately with the state’s most powerful financier, bond broker W. R. (Witt) Stephens, only hours before entering the race, implying that he was Stephens’s puppet as well. Rumors spread that he had been promised a federal judgeship if he lost.
These broadsides against Holt were for the most part bogus. Although he arose from the party establishment, he was not beholden to Faubus or Stephens, but suffered from his own becalmed nature. He demonstrated passion once, at the start of the campaign, when he paid his filing fee, banged his fist on the desk, and bellowed, “I am completely free and unobligated.” That done, he assumed naively that the attacks against him would end.
In his own fashion, Holt thought that his campaign offered the most important symbol of change. He surrounded himself with young people, a coterie of college student leaders, and called them “the Holt Generation.” It was an adaptation of the popular television commercials heralding “the Pepsi Generation,” with a jingle and red, white, and blue buttons evoking the soft-drink imagery. Lyda Holt, president of the freshman class at Mary Baldwin, was one officer in Holt’s generational brigade, which also included Paul Fray, president of the Young Democrats at Ouachita Baptist University; Leslie Smith of Vanderbilt University, a former Arkansas Junior Miss; Dick King, president of the Arkansas State Teachers College student body; David (Mac) Glover, past president of the University of Arkansas student body; Bill Allen, a former Arkansas Boys State governor and student leader at Memphis State; and Bill Clinton, former Boys Nation senator and sophomore class president at Georgetown.
The young recruits worked sixteen-hour days, often sleeping at the Marion Hotel or on a spare couch at the Holts’ house on Reservoir Road. The college boys wore khaki pants and blue knit shirts or white shirts and ties. Clinton was the youngest member of the group, aside from the judge’s daughter. In larger gatherings of the Holt Generation crowd and in correspondence to his Georgetown friends, Clinton assumed a modest posture—“and warming the bench, me,” he wrote to Denise Hyland when describing the powerhouse lineup of student leaders. But he came off the bench at the first opportunity, offering to be the chauffeur when the campaign brain trust decided that Holt’s wife, Mary, and two daughters, Lyda and Melissa, should barnstorm the state. Holt toured the state in one car; his family, with Bill Clinton driving them, toured in another. They would head out during the week and return to Little Rock on weekends to do their laundry.
For a young man who wanted to make his name in Arkansas politics, that might have been one of the two best jobs in the Holt campaign. Bill Allen had the other: he was Holt’s travel aide. But traveling the state with the Holt women offered certain advantages. (“Bill was no dummy,” Lyda Holt would joke later.) They were more interesting company, for one thing, and they sometimes turned to their driver for advice, or even invited him now and then to be a stand-in.
They were quite a quartet, Clinton and the Holt women, driving around the state in a Ford sedan with a banner proclaiming “FRANK HOLT FAMILY” on the side door, Bill and Mrs. Holt in the front seat, talking politics or literature, Lyda and Melissa in the back, practicing the speech they might give at the next town square. “I never took orders from three women before,” Clinton wrote with mock displeasure to Denise Hyland in Manhattan. This comment was a bit disingenuous, as a triumvirate of women—his grandmother, his mother, and his high school principal—had been the only ones to order him around his entire life, and it could not mask the pleasure he was getting from the assignment. He was thrilled to tell his East Coast girlfriend of all the exotic places they had visited—“Marmaduke and Piggott (some names, huh?)”—and to send her postcards from such landmarks as Burks Café and Steakhouse in Conway—“Here I come, broke and loaded with bull.”
His letters to Denise often lavished praise on Mrs. Holt, who stayed up several hours past midnight one night in a small-town motel talking politics with him. One day they were driving along a rural highway and noticed that a house was on fire. They helped evacuate the residents, along with a batch of puppies.
As the fire engines arrived, Mrs. Holt said, “Get in the car, we’ve got to get out of here!”
“Why?” implored Clinton. “This is good press!”
But they left.
Near the end of June, the Holt Generation group gathered in Little Rock to tape a fifteen-minute campaign program. It offered Clinton a chance to shine among his peers, and to save face for his colleague, Dick King. King could not remember what he wanted to say, so he wrote his speech on his hand. But his hand started to sweat from the television lights. “The joke was when my hand started running I couldn’t remember what I believed in any more. Bill had to rescue me by whispering my lines to me,” King would later recall. Clinton wrote Denise about the show, diminishing his own role (“I looked ugly”) while boasting about the results: “Many people called in and said they thought it was the best political program they had ever seen.”
The day after the show aired, he sent a letter to his grandmother at her nursing home in Hope. “Dear Mammaw—I hope you saw me on TV last night. Mother said she called you and told you I’d be on,” he wrote. “The program was pretty good, I thought, and I sure hope it gets Judge Holt some votes. Last night I was at the little town of Alread, near Clinton, at the same time the TV program was on. I had to speak to a small group of people there. This job is great. I really feel like I’m doing something worthwhile.” Clinton closed the note by saying he would be in Hope for a rally on July 7.
Lyda Holt later remembered that she was scheduled to give the speech in downtown Hope that night, but Clinton made a special plea. “Bill came up to Mother and said, ‘I know Lyda’s supposed to speak, but my grandmother is going to be in the audience, so is it okay if I did it?’ I thought, ‘Great,’ since I didn’t like speaking that much anyway. So Bill spoke. And if we had any doubts about his future, they were erased. He had that ability to take feelings and emotions and match them to words. It was a gift from God. He gave a warm, true gutty vision of my dad. He talked about how honest Dad was. How he could bring Arkansas forward and move it out of the past. How he had a vision for young people, a vision for Arkansas. And he talked about family and roots.”
In recounting the scene to Denise in a letter the next day, Clinton presented a different account, making it seem as though he had been forced to give a speech that he was not prepared to deliver. “Last night I spoke for Judge Holt on the courthouse square,” he wrote. “His daughter Lyda was supposed to give the address but Mrs. Holt made me do it when she found out my grandmother was in the audience. You would have been proud of me. I didn’t think I did so well, but some of the prejudiced home folks were really giving me the big head—plus saying—‘Why I haven’t seen you since you were this high’ or ‘I remember your mother used to wheel you down Main Street in your baby buggy.’ It was great to be home.”
Hope was an ancestral home for Mary Holt as well. Her uncle, a former congressman, had once been the town’s leading politician. The day after the speech, she took Clinton and her daughters out to Rose Hill Cemetery to clear the family grave sites and grace them with fresh flowers. When they were done, Clinton asked Lyda Holt if she wanted to walk in the cemetery. They took a long walk around. Finally, Clinton stopped and said, “This is my dad.” He pointed to a flat marble gravestone about fifteen feet from the path on the northern edge of the cemetery. It read:
WILLIAM JEFFERSON BLYTHE
FEB. 27, 1918
MAY 17, 1946
“Oh, my Lord,” Lyda Holt gasped. She had always thought that Mr. Clint
on was his dad. They stood there quietly as Clinton told them the story of how his father had been killed in a car accident before Bill was born. Blythe’s grave rested next to an identical marker for Clinton’s maternal grandfather, Eldridge Cassidy, the Hope iceman, who died at age fifty-six. The visit, he told Denise in a letter, was “a good reminder that I have a lot of living to do for two other fine fellows who never even got close to the average lifespan…. If I had to die tomorrow I guess I’d feel in a way that I’ve lived a long time—and a full time. But should I live to be old I know I’ll feel as if I just started on this journey of life and hardly be ready to leave.”
From the cemetery, Clinton took the Holts over to see Mack McLarty, who was home for the summer working at his father’s Ford dealership. Seeing Mack and his family, the symbols of success in Hope, always reassured Clinton, he later told a friend, yet served to remind him of how much work there was ahead for him to get where he wanted to go, far beyond the life of a small-town hero.
A few days later, the foursome spent an afternoon campaigning in Arkadelphia in the Fourth Congressional District where Democrat David Pryor was on his way to winning a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. It was a scorching day, and Pryor was dripping with sweat as he walked toward the Arkadelphia fire station to start shaking hands. As he approached, a young man came strolling out and struck up an intense conver-sation. When Pryor got back to his car, his wife asked, ‘Who was that you were talking to?’ Pryor said it was young Bill Clinton from Hot Springs. “You’re gonna hear a lot about him,” Pryor said. He could tell. When Clinton asked a question, he listened to the response. He was, said Pryor, “on fire.”
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