First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Temperatures soared near the century mark as the Holt family caravan rolled east toward the Mississippi Delta. “I think the heat has burned GU out of my system,” Clinton wrote to Denise, referring to Georgetown by its initials. Hot, flat, and poor, the Delta was by any measure a long way from the hilltop, and had more of the feel of rural black poverty than Hope, Hot Springs, and Little Rock, the Arkansas towns with which he was most familiar. Clinton’s reactions to what he was seeing in the Delta alternated between awe and embarrassment.

  “Boy, you meet all kinds on a trip like this,” he told Denise in a July 14 letter. “I would give anything if you could see all the tiny towns we’ve been through—Altheimer, Wabbaseka, Ulm, McGehee, Lake Village, Arkansas City. The populations are mostly Negroes and the towns are either just a square or only one street for a couple of blocks. The buildings are the same as those erected at the town’s birth.” But in another section of that same letter he described his dismay at encountering Deep South racism at its most blatant. “Now we are campaigning in the heart of cotton country, south and east Arkansas, where Negroes are still niggers’and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw restrooms and waiting rooms still marked in Colored and White. It made me so sick to my stomach.”

  When they reached McGehee, the Holt women attracted the notice of a feature writer from the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, who wrote an article about what he considered the novelty of finding a candidate’s wife and daughters out on the trail. The story detailed the scene inside the car. One can see Clinton’s presence everywhere, though he is mentioned only at the end in an offbeat way:

  The Holts travel in an airconditioned Ford in an attempt to save themselves from the unbearable heat—but it doesn’t help much. They jump in and out of the auto time and again all day.

  “We’re constantly debating whether it’s better to run the air-condition-ing when we’re in the car or just roll the windows down and stay in one temperature all the time,” Mrs. Holt said.

  Between towns the two girls do some reading and Mrs. Holt looks over a typical itinerary provided a week at a time by campaign headquarters in Little Rock…. In the back seat Wednesday were two paperback books, one on Kennedy and a novel—Khartoum. The car, loaned for the campaign, came equipped with a stereo tape player which Wednesday appropriately was playing a tape of the Norman Luboff choir titled “On the Country Side.”

  And there’s a convenient safety device. College student Bill Clinton of Hot Springs, the Holt family driver, can lock all four car doors instantly with a flick of the switch on the dash.

  Those books in the back seat did not belong to the Holt girls, but to Clinton. In his letters he faithfully reported to Denise what he was reading and suggested readings for her. “Never finished ‘1000 Days’ [Arthur Schlesinger’s account of the Kennedy presidency] but did read Khartoum, the Loved One by Evelyn Waugh and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” he told her. “Have dabbled in five or six others.” In response to Denise’s latest review of a book he had recommended, he added: “I knew you would like The Making of the President ’60. White is a great writer and a perceptive politico.” He also noted that he had recently received a letter from his favorite professor, Walter Giles, “wishing good luck in the campaign, but expressing hopes it hasn’t interfered with my reading.” If anything, the campaign widened Clinton’s perspective, presenting him with characters straight out of many of the books he was reading. After encountering one provincial tycoon, Clinton described him to Denise with a literary refer-ence. “Just like a Jonas Cord of ߠThe Carpetbaggers’ or Will Long of ߠA Long Hot Summer,’ he wrote, “he hasn’t learned to gracefully exercise the power that goes with his money.”

  • • •

  EVERY week, Frank Holt’s opponents attacked him with unsubstantiated charges, and every week Holt chose to ignore the attacks. Clinton admired Holt’s attitude and thought that it was strategically sound. “Denise, he’s never lost an election and I see why,” he told his girlfriend. “He really lives by his religious and ethical convictions without being self-righteous or pious. He refuses to attack his opponents as they attack him. He wants to win on his own merits or not at all. He thinks he can’t build Arkansas unless he can win in this way.” Then came the shock of primary night. Holt barely survived, finishing second in a six-way race to Jim Johnson, his despised former colleague on the state Supreme Court, the self-described “Justice Jim” who appealed to people’s fears and prejudices in his backward state. Johnson finished with 25 percent of the vote to 22 percent for Holt and 15 percent for the third-place finisher, Brooks Hays. Holt’s showing was more of a surprise to his followers than it should have been. In retrospect they could see how little room to maneuver he had, with Johnson on his right, Hays on his left, and scores of Republicans taking advantage of the open primary system to vote for Johnson, the man they thought would be easiest for Rockefeller to beat.

  Holt tried to shape the runoff race as New South versus Old South, but to little effect. To whatever extent Arkansans were looking to become part of a New South, those who did had now decided that Winthrop Rockefel-ler, not Holt, would be the one to take them there. And in a year when many of the state’s schools were just facing desegregation, there was plenty of sentiment around for Justice Jim’s Old South.

  Three days before the runoff, Clinton wrote Denise that he thought Holt had finally taken the offensive in the campaign. “All I can do is pray for reason and real courage to come to our voters Tuesday.” On election eve: “I think I’m sure victory will come, but you can never tell. And after the shock of the 26th I’m so worried…. Cross your fingers and hold tight—he’s just got to get in there.” But the family already knew better. Lyda Holt sensed on election morning that they had lost. “We went to church that morning and let go.” That night, Clinton was assigned to accompany Lyda. She later remembered “how reassuring” he was. “He stayed sweet and nice. When you lose an election, it’s like a death. And Bill that night said to me, ‘Now remember, the outcome of an election is not the measure of a man.ߣ”

  Clinton made his next important political move as Judge Holt was playing out his last one. He told Jack Holt, Jr., that he needed some money to help pay for his college tuition and wondered whether there was any way he could work for Senator Fulbright’s office in Washington. Holt called Lee Williams, Fulbright’s administrative assistant. “Lee, I’ve got one you shouldn’t overlook,” he said. “There’s a young man down here who’s just the kind the senator likes to have around him.”

  Lee Williams was always looking to help aspiring young men, just as he had been helped when Fulbright called the University of Arkansas Law School a generation earlier and asked if there were any bright graduates around who could work on his staff. Clinton was at home on Scully Street a week later when he got a morning call from Williams. “You’ve been recommended to me by someone in whom I have implicit faith,” Williams said. “Tell me about yourself and what your aims are.” Clinton talked about his interest in government and politics and said he needed money to complete his education at Georgetown. He brought up the time he had come to Washington for Boys Nation and had lunch with Senator Fulbright.

  “Well,” said Williams, “we’ve got two jobs up here—one part time that pays about thirty-five hundred a year and another that is full time that pays about five thousand.”

  “Well, how about two part-time jobs?” asked Clinton.

  Williams chuckled.

  The job offer brought with it only one disappointment. All summer long Denise Hyland had been planning to visit Clinton and his family in Hot Springs. She had arranged to come near the end of August. But Clinton would be gone by then. Williams wanted him right away. Virginia Clinton wrote Denise a note of apology. “We’re all so disappointed you’re not coming. The prospect of your coming even brightened Mr. Holt’s defeat. You know my dear this door is always open to you. So this time you set the date. Bill’s Daddy and brother both feel cheated.” But Clinton would see Denise s
oon enough in Washington. Nothing could get him down now. On August 19, the day he turned twenty years old, he declared it “one of my happiest birthdays ever.” He had just gone up to Little Rock to pick out a new suit, a pair of shoes, and luggage. He was “okay on the clothes end,” he told Denise. “But I’m still awful nervous about going to D.C.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE BACK ROOM BOYS

  ON THE AFTERNOON of September 26, 1966, Bill Clinton dashed off a letter to his grandmother at her nursing home in Hope extolling his new life as a Georgetown junior and clerk on Capitol Hill. “Dear Mammaw,” he wrote in his backward-tilting left-handed scrawl,

  I am well settled in school and at work. I attend class in the morning and at night and work in the afternoon. It is of course exciting to be here around all the senators and already this year I’ve seen the president, the vice president and senators Fulbright, Robert and Edward Kennedy, Javits, Long of Louisiana, Smathers of Florida, Yarborough of Texas, Anderson of New Mexico, McClellan, Thurmond of South Carolina, Church of Idaho, Williams of New Jersey, Boggs of Delaware, McCarthy of Minnesota, Murphy of California, Stennis of Mississippi and others. There’s not much time to do anything but study and work, but I love being busy and hard work is good for people.

  Clinton wrote the note from a desk in the documents room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a cramped annex on the far side of the committee’s fourth-floor public hearing chamber in the new Senate Office Building. The annex was a cross between a mailroom and a library, its walls lined with filing cabinets containing reports, newspaper articles, and committee publications. Three college students clerked there: Alabaman Charles Parks, who attended American University and got his job through the patronage of his home-state senator, John D. Sparkman; and Arkansans Phil Dozier of the University of Maryland and Bill Clinton of Georgetown, both hired by Lee Williams, the top personal aide to the committee chairman, Senator Fulbright. The fourth junior clerk was Bertie Bowman, the only black on the staff, a Washingtonian who had worked his way up from janitor. By their elders on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff these four were known as “the back room boys.”

  They sorted the mail, filled the hundreds of requests for committee reports that came in each week, combed a half-dozen daily newspapers and clipped them for stories related to foreign affairs, and ran errands between the Senate Office Building and the main committee room in the Capitol. The back room, as with everything on Capitol Hill, had its own seniority system. Parks, the oldest of the three college boys, relegated the messenger role to Dozier, who in turn passed it along to Clinton. It was the equivalent, for Clinton, of winning a free pass to his favorite amusement park. It allowed him to roam the corridors of power and schmooze with secretaries and congressional aides, and also offered him more opportunities to study the senators he had listed in the note to his grandmother, often stopping to listen to their pronouncements at committee hearings.

  Fulbright and his chief of staff generally frowned upon aides loitering in the back of the room when the committee was in session, but “they granted dispensation to the boys who were working their way through school,” according to Norvill Jones, then the staff expert on Southeast Asia. Buddy Kendricks, the documents room supervisor, made a special effort to get the boys to the hearings as part of their Capitol Hill education. The tutor for that education was not Fulbright, who was formal and usually too preoccupied for small talk, but Lee Williams, who kept close watch on the young Arkansans he had placed in the Capitol Hill patronage system. Phil Dozier regarded Williams as “a surrogate father to Bill Clinton and me—he took us under his wing and watched over us.” He also constantly reminded them how lucky they were to witness the great foreign policy debates of their time. Williams viewed the back room assignment as “the kind of thing that if you were a student you’d pray for, a once in a lifetime opportunity for someone with the ambitions of Bill Clinton. Everything in the international arena came through that committee. It had a tremendous influence on those boys.”

  Clinton had long considered the committee chairman his role model. At age sixty-one, James William Fulbright, a Rhodes Scholar, former president of the University of Arkansas, and scion of a wealthy Fayetteville family, was seen as a dignified statesman of superior intellect whose presence in Washington countered the mocking stereotypes of unsophisticated Arkansas. “People dumped on our state and said we were all a bunch of back country hayseeds, and we had a guy in the Senate who doubled the IQ of any room he entered,” Clinton once said of Fulbright. “It was pretty encouraging. It made us feel pretty good, like we might amount to some-thing.”

  Fulbright’s public persona had changed considerably in the three years since he and Clinton first met for lunch in the Senate Dining Room during the Boys Nation visit. Back then, he was considered an insider whose mission was to help guide the Kennedy administration’s foreign policy through Congress. When Lyndon Johnson ascended to the presidency after Kennedy’s assassination, Fulbright assumed a similar function. “You’re my secretary of state,” Johnson once said to him. He played a reluctant but essential supporting role in passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which the administration took as congressional acquiescence to its plans to send more American soldiers to fight in Vietnam. But by 1965 Fulbright had split with Johnson when the president sent troops to the Dominican Republic to quell a leftist rebellion. He thought the administration was panicking over communism for no reason.

  Soon the fissure separating Johnson and Fulbright over the Dominican Republic expanded into a profound ideological divide on Vietnam. By the time Clinton arrived on Capitol Hill in 1966, his Arkansas role model had concluded that the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake waged by an administration that had deceived Congress and deluded itself with what Fulbright called “the arrogance of power.” He was becoming the administration’s most pointed critic, and the foreign relations committee which he headed was perceived as the center of dissent to Johnson and the war. Johnson boasted in private that he would destroy Fulbright and other Senate doves within six months. Fulbright wrote a letter to Johnson trying to explain the historical limits of superpower force. “Greece, Rome, Spain, England, Germany and others lost their preeminence because of failure to recognize their limitations, or, as I called it, the arrogance of their power,” he stressed, “and my hope is that this country, presently the greatest and the most powerful in the world, may learn by the mistakes of its predecessors.”

  Clinton, who held a student deferment and was two years away from the threat of being drafted, at first viewed the personal and ideological conflict between his boss and President Johnson with mixed feelings. He was “for the war—or at least not against it,” when he began work that fall. It did not take long for him to change. Clinton admired Johnson for his support of civil rights, an issue where he had shown more courage than Fulbright, but in foreign relations Fulbright held sway.

  It was difficult to work on the foreign relations committee staff and not be influenced by the pervasive antiwar environment. There “wasn’t anyone on that staff who felt otherwise,” according to Norvill Jones. “There was not a hawk on that staff.” Jones, who had come to Washington to work as Fulbright’s messenger boy when he was only fourteen in 1944, had become “the main Vietnam man” on the committee staff by the mid-1960s. Clinton, as he made the rounds as messenger, expressed a deep interest in the committee’s Vietnam work. Jones recalled later that Clinton “was always picking my brain—trying to learn more about it.”

  When not quizzing Jones, Clinton would turn to Lee Williams for his analysis. Williams, a crafty political operative, had at first cautioned Fulbright against breaking publicly with Johnson, arguing that it would cost the senator dearly in terms of federal projects in Arkansas. But once the break was made, Williams was as blunt in his opposition to the war as anyone on Capitol Hill. He and Clinton spent hours discussing America’s role in Vietnam. He told Clinton that he was not a peacenik, but that the last good war U.
S. soldiers fought in was World War II. He was ashamed that his country was involved in Vietnam, where he felt it had no busi-ness.

  Clinton and Dozier, southerners who had grown up in environments where the military was revered, where most boys longed to become Ma-rines, often debated whether they could fight in a war they opposed. Dozier told Clinton that he wanted to serve his country but was against the war. Clinton said he felt the same way. On rare occasions, they received special invitations to share their concerns with Fulbright. One day Clara Buchanan, Fulbright’s secretary, came up to Room 4225, the back room, and said that the senator wanted to take Bill and Phil to lunch in the Senate Dining Room. Both boys were excited by the invitation, but Dozier was also nervous. He wanted to impress the senator that he was keeping up with events in Vietnam, so he asked him over lunch about the role the Laotian mountain tribes were playing. “What impact if any are the Montagnards having on the Vietnam War?” Dozier asked. Fulbright said, “I have no idea what impact the Montagnards are having on the war.” Dozier felt as though Fulbright thought he was “missing an oar.”

  Dozier was struck by how sure of himself Clinton seemed. One day they were sitting at their desks in the back room, stuffing committee reports into envelopes, when Clinton turned to him and said, “Someday, this is going to be my office.” It was unclear whether Clinton meant it literally or simply as a way of saying he intended to be in public service, Dozier said later, but he had no doubts that the prediction would be fulfilled or exceeded in either case. Dozier had shared an apartment on E Street with a young Capitol Hill elevator operator who dated Luci Baines Johnson, the president’s younger daughter. He had visited the White House several times over the years—even after his boss and the president had their falling out—listening to records and doing the frug with the Johnson girls in the living quarters solarium. Clinton was fascinated. He would often ask Dozier, “What’s it like inside the White House?”