• • •
CLINTON and his friend Tom Campbell had planned to live in a house with several of their buddies in their junior year, but Campbell’s father killed the idea, saying his son’s grades were too precarious for the off-campus lifestyle. If Campbell carried a B average for the year, he could live in a house as a senior. Clinton decided that he could not abandon his longtime roommate, so for their third year at Georgetown they shared a dormitory suite in Copley Hall, and once again Campbell was treated to the buzz of an alarm clock waking Clinton in the dark so that he could study before breakfast, the only free time he had in an eighteen-hour day of classes and work.
The busy roommates rarely spent time together except on weekends. One Saturday morning in early October, they drove through the fall foliage of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to visit Lyda Holt at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton. Denise Hyland was still Clinton’s steady girlfriend at Georgetown, but he had grown close to Lyda during the summer campaign back in Arkansas, and they saw quite a bit of each other that fall. In Staunton, Lyda and one of her friends took Clinton and Campbell on a long walk around town and showed them the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson.
Frank Holt had been depressed in the months after his loss in the gubernatorial race. Lyda encouraged him to come east to cheer his spirits. “Daddy needed a boost and I thought Bill could help give it to him. So he came to Washington and we all went out to dinner at Blackie’s House of Beef and talked politics and told stories and laughed.” Holt returned to Washington several times that school year and often called Clinton when he was in town. The veteran judge and the ambitious collegian had a positive effect on each other. Holt knew important people in Washington and introduced them to Clinton, whose esteem for his political elders and enthusiastic plans for a career in Arkansas politics made Holt feel better about the future of his state. “Last week Frank Holt was in Washington and we had a fine time,” Clinton wrote to his grandmother after one visit. “We went to see Congressman Jim Trimble who was our congressman from Hot Springs before he lost the last election. He was in Congress for 22 years and really told some good stories.”
That Thanksgiving, Clinton traveled to New Jersey with Denise and spent the holiday in the warm embrace of the Hyland family. They headed back to school on Sunday with Tom Campbell and his younger sister. Clinton was driving his white Buick. Mary Lou sat in front and Tom and Denise were in the back, sleeping. As they approached Baltimore, there was a pileup and a car smashed into Clinton’s from the rear. Denise was the only one hurt—a minor whiplash injury to her neck that was later treated at Georgetown University Hospital. Clinton apparently bore no fault for the accident, but none of his friends placed much trust in his driving ability.
• • •
CLINTON’S work on Capitol Hill did not seem to harm his studies, or his beloved Quality Points Index, as he had once feared. “My grades for the first semester came out pretty good, made a 3.52, that’s about an A-average, and my name will go on the Dean’s List,” he wrote his grandmother. As planned, he entered the race for student council president in the spring of 1967. David Matter, the junior class president, filed to challenge him for the post, the pinnacle of student power on the East Campus, but soon changed his mind. Matter realized that he was elected junior class president only because Clinton had decided not to run that year. He did not feel he could beat Clinton this time, so he withdrew and instead signed on as Clinton’s campaign manager.
Matter had reason to believe this race was a sure thing. Clinton had won easily in his two previous races for freshman and sophomore class presi-dent, and by his junior year was perhaps the most prominent member of his class, better known than any sports figure at a college that did not emphasize athletics. Not only was Clinton a strong presence on campus, but his opponent, Terry Modglin, a working-class kid from St. Louis, seemed to shrink in contrast. Modglin was short, wiry, and bespectacled, and neither a stellar student nor an adept speaker. But the very characteristics that seemed to make Clinton the favorite worked against him in the council president campaign. His political skills, his ability to think on his feet, to build coalitions and networks, were unrivaled on campus; but perhaps they were a bit too much, and he was too smooth. People were wary of him. “Bill,” said Tom Campbell, “was a little too slick for some people.”
Modglin ran the campaign of his life. He had begun preparing for it a year ahead of time, late in his sophomore year, when he lined his desk with strategy cards reminding him what he had to do to build support. His obsession was so great that one day Phil Verveer, a student government leader two years ahead of Modglin and Clinton, walked into Modglin’s dormitory room, took one look at the note cards on his desk, shook his head, and muttered, “Don’t do it, Terry, it’ll ruin your grades and you’ll never get into law school.” Modglin was not to be deterred. His organization was meticulous. If someone asked him who his first one hundred supporters were, he could list them in order. He recruited the best communicators to his side, realizing that he could not compete with Clinton as an orator. He developed a Madison Avenue—style campaign theme. In imitation of the “Dodge Rebellion” commercials on television, he blanketed Georgetown with banners urging students to “Join the Modge Rebel-lion!” The campaign trademark became the white cowboy hat, and Modglin supporters played the roles of good guys in a Wild West shootout with Bill Clinton.
Clinton played into Modglin’s hand by building his campaign around a nineteen-point document whose title revealed its sober attitude: “A Realistic Approach to Student Government.” One page listed his achievements at Georgetown—president of freshman and sophomore classes, chairman of freshman orientation committee, chairman of Sports Week, chairman of the unification campaign to merge the student councils of East Campus and the Yard, listed in Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities, Dean’s List, chairman of Interdenominational Services, editor of the first-ever collegewide student directory—a list that seemed more impressive to parents than to most college students in 1967. His specific proposals were moderate, from asking for lower parking costs and student-written course critiques to demanding less dictatorial advisers in the Institute of Languages and Linguistics and better courses in the junior year abroad program.
But Clinton not only misread the way his college résumé might be perceived by his peers, he underestimated the mood of rebellion against the school administration and its paternalistic rules. According to Jim Moore, Clinton related to the Jesuit management “in a positive way—as usual. He wanted to co-opt the management and convince them they were wrong and turn them around. Some people felt Bill wouldn’t be tough enough to get the administration to loosen up in its control of our lives and curricula. Georgetown students were just discovering that they could sometimes get authority figures to bend and change. Bill’s approach was too slow for them.”
Clinton understood what was happening to him, and Kit Ashby chided him for his reluctance to criticize Modglin, even in private. “Bill never wanted to say, ‘That guy’s an asshole!’” He would say, ‘That’s an interesting guy,’ or whatever. We used to kid him about that—‘Come on, Bill,’ we’d say, ‘Form the mouth, ass … hole’—but his basic instinct was to find, even with the most obvious asshole, something good. We wanted him to get angry in that campaign but he would not do it.” Clinton was still keeping faith with the philosophy that Judge Holt ingrained in him the previous summer: Never stoop to the level of the opposition. He told Jim Moore that he felt his approach was reasonable and that in the end the majority of students would understand his message. He would not pander, he said, to “the radical segment of the student body.”
To call Modglin and his supporters radical is a stretch. The extent of Modglin’s political activism was that he had prayed for peace during an antiwar vigil on campus and had participated, as Clinton had, in the school’s volunteer program in the inner city. In many ways he was to the right of Clinton, and showed no qualms about bargaining for votes anywhere he c
ould find them. He struck an alliance with the conservative Delta Phi fraternity, the arch rival of Clinton’s Alpha Phi Omega, by promising them the coveted chairmanship of the Diplomats Ball. (On election day, Modglin recalled later, “guys emerged from the frat house in a drunken stupor and were led to the polls” to vote against Clinton.)
Clinton’s allies worked tirelessly for him. Denise Hyland had become so attuned to Bill’s political needs that she carefully selected a dorm room that year in Darnell Hall on the side near the busiest walking path so that she could stick Clinton signs in her window to the best effect. She and her friends made hundreds of yellow and red cardboard campaign buttons and distributed “This Is Clinton Country” signs in all the dorms. They went around on a door-to-door canvass, only to discover that their candidate was now turning people off who had once admired him. The election was painful. Kit Ashby later said he did not realize “the depth of negative feelings until near the end,” when many of his friends told him they were going with Modglin.
Whatever chance Clinton had of overcoming the perception that he was the machine candidate was wiped out in the final week when his campaign was involved in two dirty tricks. The first misdeed was a mild one—a newsletter supporting Clinton called “The Spirit of ’67” was censured by the East Campus Election Committee for claiming endorsements of seniors without their permission. The second episode involved an overreaction by campaign manager David Matter. There were campaign posters plastered all over campus, but Clinton’s seemed to be disappearing. After a week of what he took to be sign-stealing by the opposition, Matter decided to retaliate. “We stayed up all night and went through the entire campus and tore down every single Modglin poster. Bill was not involved. But I was using his car, the white Buick convertible. I piled the Modglin posters in the car and drove to an overlook over the George Washington Parkway and threw them over the hillside. And I got caught.”
The election was on a Friday. Clinton’s fraternity brothers in Alpha Phi, wearing blue and gold armbands symbolizing their impartiality, counted the votes that night in the Hall of Nations in the Walsh Building, the scene of two previous Clinton victory celebrations. Both candidates were there along with dozens of their supporters. As the vote tabulations were placed on a chalkboard, dorm by dorm, it became clear quite early that “the Modge Rebellion” had carried the day. The final vote was 717 for Modglin and 570 for Clinton. The rebels in white hats shouted: “Modglin! Modglin! Modglin!” and lifted their unlikely champion on their shoulders to carry him out of the room. “I was completely euphoric,” Modglin recalls. “And Bill looked like he was in shock.” Clinton stayed behind to deliver a concession speech in which he thanked his campaign workers and wished Modglin the best of luck. Then he and his friends went over to what was supposed to be a victory party organized by Denise Hyland at the house Jim Moore and Kit Ashby were living in on Potomac Avenue.
Lyda Holt, who had taken a deep interest in Clinton’s campaign from her long-distance perch down at Mary Baldwin College, forsook any social activities that weekend night and stood by a pay telephone booth outside her dormitory making calls every thirty minutes trying to get the results. She never got through to Clinton and he never called her back. “As the night wore on I thought, Oh, Lord, that’s not a good sign. I never heard from him, so I figured he lost.”
Matter, who took personal responsibility for his candidate’s demise, was inconsolable at the party, feeling so bad that he started crying. Clinton hugged him again. “Bill was as strong as can be, hugging me,” Matter said later. “He was concerned about my welfare that evening and thereafter. I took it far harder than he.” On the outside, perhaps; but inside, Clinton suffered a deep pain that he shared with a few close friends. Kit Ashby knew that his friend “really felt burned. He learned in later years how to take punches, but that one really hurt because it was so personal. He hurts very badly when someone says, ‘I don’t like you, you’re no damn good.’ He thought his heart was in the right place. But there were more than twelve hundred and fifty people who knew him and more than half voted against him. It hurt.”
The lesson, Clinton told Jim Moore that night, was that he had not been listening to people hard enough. “His response was, ‘If I do it again, I’ll just have to work harder. Instead of handbills under every door, I’ll have to talk to everybody in person. I’ll have to find out the people I thought would be with me who voted for the other guy and go out and talk to those people.’ It was all a matter of working harder.”
Yet life moves on quickly for the young. The very night that he cried on Clinton’s shoulder, Matter ended in bliss with a girl he met at the party. Modglin went on to a senior year of leadership that was marked more by chaos than rebellion—he flunked two courses and nearly got booted out of school. And Clinton, relieved of student politics, was free to concentrate on a competition of a different sort, a campaign for a prestigious graduate school scholarship that he might not have had a chance to win had the majority of his peers at Georgetown not considered him a shade too smooth to lead their student council.
AT same time that he struggled with political rejection, Clinton sought personal redemption of a sort, a final resolution of his relationship with his stepfather. Roger Clinton’s physical decline, obvious for years, was now taking a life-threatening turn. Two years earlier, back on Scully Street, he had been sitting at the dinette when Virginia looked over at him and said, “Roger, your neck is swollen!” One of Virginia’s close friends in the Hot Springs medical community suggested that Roger check into the Duke Medical Center in North Carolina for tests and treatment. There they discovered that he had cancer in a gland behind his ear and recommended surgery. Roger would not agree to anything that altered his appearance. He agreed to have the biopsy, but told her that he would never have a disfiguring operation. The cancer was fought with radiation instead. Roger made the long trip to Durham four times for treatment.
Bill visited Roger Clinton several times that spring of his junior year. He took Denise Hyland with him once. She remembers that she wore a navy blue suit and Bill a coat and tie, and that the weekend evoked a feeling of overwhelming sadness. But at no time during the drive down to Durham and back and never during their three-year relationship did Clinton confide in Denise about his stepfather’s drinking and abuse. She was not alone in that regard. Despite the trauma that Roger had put the family through over the years, Bill hid much of the animosity he might have felt. As confessional as Clinton was about other subjects, he never told his friends in high school or in college about his stepfather’s darker side, though they might have seen it accidentally during visits to Scully Street. Lyda Holt visited the house one summer and saw Roger stagger and throw up violently into a wastebasket. But to Clinton’s friends, he seemed like a vague figure. Clinton did not mention him often, and when he did it was with formal respect.
During his years at Georgetown, Clinton was distanced from the family turmoil but could not rid himself of the guilt he felt about Roger’s troubles and his inability to resolve them. “… I know I have never been much help to you—never had the courage to come and talk about it,” he wrote that spring in a letter to Roger in which he sought, finally, to get his stepfather to turn to him for help. “You ought to look everywhere for help, Daddy,” Clinton wrote. “You ought to write me more—people—even some of my political enemies—confide in me….” But now that Roger was weak and ill, the need was not so much for reform as for reconciliation. The same son who at age fourteen had ordered his stepfather to stand up and listen carefully as he told him never to strike his mother again, now at age twenty-one felt sympathy for a defeated man struggling to stay alive.
“Daddy has been so sick,” he wrote to Denise. “But there’s something wonderful now—he knows for sure—as much for sure as can be—that he has post-radiation sickness, which will endure for a long time but is not a recurrence of the malignancy we feared. The prospect of getting well boosts his spirit. He has fought so hard, so bravel
y—maybe the only battle he’s ever really faced. Surely he’ll be allowed to win.”
• • •
WHEN the school year was out, Clinton did not return home to Arkansas. He kept working in the back room at the foreign relations committee in the mornings and had signed up for two summer school courses at Georgetown for the afternoons. Before classes started, he and Tommy Caplan took a vacation up the coast. In New York City, they toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection, where they saw a self-portrait of Rembrandt, a painting, Clinton told Denise later, that left him “truly entranced for the first time in my life by an artist’s work.” When they were together, this voluble duo—the writer from Baltimore and his big-handed political buddy—knew how to have a good time. That night, on Caplan’s tab, they took rooms at the Carlyle Hotel and “in a fit of gluttony had dinner at the restaurant and then ordered room service.”
The binge left Clinton wallowing in the guilt that often enveloped him when it came to food and willpower. When he returned to Washington, he told Denise that he was looking forward to the discipline that his summer schedule would impose on him, a routine that would “reintroduce me to sleep, exercise and good food.” When he started jogging that summer, his friends were surprised. He had not been much of an athlete and certainly never seemed the running type. So why did he start running now? Perhaps a hint came in a letter to Denise. “This running is a great deal,” he concluded a bit prematurely. “You can run for 30 minutes or so and then eat all you want and put on no weight.”
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