First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  A more likely reason was that Clinton had been encouraged by Senator Fulbright to begin the process of seeking a Rhodes Scholarship, an honor then awarded yearly to thirty-two American men who were sent off to Oxford University in England for further academic training. Fulbright had won a Rhodes Scholarship while at the University of Arkansas and sailed for England in the fall of 1924 as an American innocent, returning as a pipe-smoking, tweeded intellectual who had enjoyed what he called the best years of his life at Oxford. The scholarship had always been associated with athleticism—Fulbright had played tennis at Arkansas, and Bill Bradley, the Princeton University basketball star, had just won one—but superior physical skills were not mandatory. Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist industrialist who founded the scholarship, said that he was looking for neither the pure intellectual nor the pure athlete, but “the best man for the world’s fight—an all-rounder, but of a special kind: an all-rounder with a bulge; some outstanding quality, be it of character, personality or ability.” Clinton had some bulges of the sort Rhodes discussed, but to be certain, he wanted to minimize any that might appear at his waist.

  It was a summer of uncertainty. In his philosophy class he read the works of Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sartre. For a graduate-level class on U.S. relations in the Far East, he prepared a twenty-eight-page paper with ninety-two footnotes on the events in August 1964 that led to congressional approval of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution—“the one that gave LBJ his blank check in Vietnam,” as Clinton told Denise in a letter. The material he needed for that report was available in the back room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which was in the midst of historic hearings on the subject. Chairman Fulbright was by then convinced that he and other senators had been lied to by President Johnson about the events in the Gulf of Tonkin three years earlier—reports of aggression against U.S. vessels by North Vietnamese gunboats had been exaggerated. The adminis-tration, Fulbright said, “had already set its policy intentions and used the attack to implement them, while misrepresenting the actual event.” He also now believed that the congressional resolution resulting from that deception did not authorize the administration to wage full-scale war. Clinton’s paper reached the same conclusions.

  For the first time, Clinton was overtaken by feelings of disillusionment. Not only did he disagree with his party’s policies in Vietnam, policies that had escalated the war to the point where thirty thousand young men were being drafted each month, but he was worried that the nation’s commitment to civil rights was diminishing. In a letter to Denise, he fretted that the status of race relations “and the good Americans who want to bomb North Vietnam into the Stone Age” made him wonder “if our nation has any shared values.”

  In the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin hearings, Clinton was assigned a rather odd diversion. Sharon Ann Evans, who had just been named Miss Arkansas, came to Washington for a day on her way to the Miss America contest in Atlantic City. Fulbright’s office had been asked to provide her with an escort. Clinton got the job. He told Denise that it was because Evans was a six-footer and “I was the only one in Fulbright’s office over six feet.” It turned out that they had several things in common. Both had lived in Hope as youngsters. Evans’s roommate at Ouachita Baptist University was Linda Yeldell, the younger sister of Clinton’s friend and neighbor, Carolyn Yeldell. But they were political opposites. When Evans was asked which dignitary she would like to meet during her visit, she chose FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Clinton cooled his heels in the lobby of the FBI building as Evans disappeared into Hoover’s inner chamber, shook the director’s hand, and chatted for five minutes, overcome, she said, by “the power, the mystique.” When she emerged, it was obvious from the look on Clinton’s face that he disapproved. She thought that he did not like her because she would rather meet Hoover than Fulbright.

  In fact Clinton was infatuated with Evans, as he was with many young women that summer. He and Denise Hyland had slowly broken off the romantic side of their relationship, though not their friendship. As their college years were nearing an end, they came to a mutual understanding that neither one of them had an interest in marriage and that it was time for them to see what else was out there. Clinton saw a lot out there. He was dating several times a week, according to one friend, “like a guy getting out of prison.” He stayed that summer at the house on Potomac Avenue with Kit Ashby and Jim Moore, and constantly seemed to show up with a new date he had met on Capitol Hill. Moore thought it was “a revelation” to Clinton that “there was a whole culture of people in Washington just there for a few years to have a good time and not focused on long-term relationships. He had met women on the Hill before but never followed up on the opportunities. Then he became a free agent, and young ladies figured it out, and it was, ‘Holy shit, Bill Clinton is free and available and looking forward to having a good time!’”

  Only the summer before, Clinton had said that the Arkansas heat was burning Washington out of his system. Now it seemed that the swirl of Washington was distancing him some from his Arkansas roots. He got home for a brief visit in early September before the start of his senior year. Several boys from his high school class had quit college or flunked out and joined the Marines. Duke Watts was about to leave for boot camp when Clinton arrived back in town. All summer, Watts and Joe Newman, one of Clinton’s close friends from band, had been “chasin’ girls” in bars and restaurants. One Friday night, as Watts later remembered it, “I was all set to go, duded up real nice, when the phone rang and it was Joe, and Joe said, ‘Clinton’s in town and he wants to go with us.’ I kind of winced a little but said all right and he tagged along.”

  They went to Coy’s Steakhouse on the edge of Hot Springs. Watts looked at Clinton and saw an alien being. He could not imagine how this fellow, the same guy who was so coveted by young women in Washington, could ever get to first base. Clinton was wearing sandals. His hair had grown out a little. Watts thought that he and Joe “knew how to dress for the women,” whereas Clinton “wasn’t well groomed, to put it mildly; I don’t know if he had any money or even ate there at Coy’s. His demeanor wasn’t equal to ours.” Watts had joined the Marine Corps and was proud of what he had 11done. He had it in his mind that he had chosen a path of honor. He was “thinking all these noble thoughts.” And then Clinton started talking about the war and how strongly he opposed it. There were, Watts thought,“some anxious moments there. I know I was glad when the night was over.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE

  THE FIVE YOUNG men who shared the white house on Potomac Avenue for their senior year in college were “boringly respectable,” according to Tommy Caplan. This was the fall of 1967, the season that followed the summer of love in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, the time when college campuses across the nation became theaters of protest, scented by tear gas and the sweet smell of pot, echoing with the chants of “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” Even the moderate young men and women of Georgetown were encountering the culture of the sixties. Allen Ginsberg, a veteran guerrilla fighter in the battle against boring respectability, visited Gaston Hall that school year and asked how many happy Hoyas in the crowd had ever smoked marijuana. He smiled beatifically when fifty hands rose. Perhaps to some of his high school classmates back in Hot Springs, Bill Clinton seemed a shade on the rabble-rousing and unkempt hippie side, but within the wider spectrum of sixties behavior, Clinton and his housemates were trim and tame.

  These were five collegians, after all, who celebrated Caplan’s twenty-first birthday that fall by flying up to New York City with their dates to dine at the fashionable “21”—not exactly an alternative food co-op. It was an elegant affair, staged in an upstairs room. Ashby sat across the table from one of Caplan’s high society friends, Jamie Auchincloss, Jacqueline Kennedy’s younger stepbrother, watching in wonderment as the son of the ruling class ate an artichoke with his hands, something the Texan had never seen. A trip to Manhattan with Caplan, the bon
vivant of the housemates, was always a grand and potentially awkward step into the high life for his college pals: this time Caplan underwrote the entire feast, with bottles all-around of Dom Pérignon, and then booked rooms at the Carlyle.

  In a moment of frustration that month, someone had scrawled “George-town Gentlemen Are Lapdogs of the Establishment” on a plywood fence surrounding the site for a new library on campus. Few on the hilltop felt compelled to dispute the insult or respond with graffiti. While one poll indicated that a majority of Georgetown students opposed the war in Vietnam, for the most part they had not yet soured on the system. One of the magnets that drew them to the School of Foreign Service was its ready access to the power establishment: Congress, the White House, Washington society, the Department of State, the Pentagon. The Potomac Avenue house was typical in that sense. Two of the five senior friends worked on Capitol Hill: Clinton for Senator Fulbright and Ashby for Senator Henry Jackson of Washington. Caplan volunteered in the office of Senator Robert Kennedy. The other housemates had military attachments: Campbell was preparing to fly planes for the Marines after graduation, and Moore, an Army brat, was buying food for the group at the commissary at Fort Myer across the Key Bridge in northern Virginia.

  Lapdogs or not, none of the Potomac five were among the fifty thousand “shaggy doves” who gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial on October 21 in the first mass demonstration against the Vietnam War, the March on the Pentagon later celebrated in prose in Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night and in poetry in Robert Lowell’s “October and November” (“… then to step off like green Union recruits for the first Bull Run, sped by photographers, the notables, the girls … fear, glory, chaos, rout … our green army staggered out on the miles-long green fields, met by the other army, the Martian, the ape, the hero, his new-fangled rifle, his green new steel helmet”). Clinton shared the conviction of many of those peace recruits that the war in Vietnam was wrong, but his opposition remained a conviction, not activist, rooted in the documents he read at the foreign relations committee and in the arguments of Chairman Fulbright.

  Fulbright, in his book The Arrogance of Power, presented a clear philosophy on political dissent, both its vital role in a democracy and its most effective means of expression, and his views played powerfully on the mind of his clerk, who cherished his autographed copy of the treatise. “To criticize one’s country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment,” Fulbright wrote there. “It is a service because it may spur the country to do better than it is doing; it is a compliment because it evidences that the country can do better than it is doing…. In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.” But for dissent to be persuasive, Fulbright argued, it had to be presented in less raucous ways than the street demonstrators were deploy-ing. “The most effective dissent is dissent expressed in an orderly, which is to say a conservative, manner,” he added. “The student, like the politician, must consider not only how to say what he means but also how to say it persuasively. The answer, I think, is that to speak persuasively one must speak in the idiom of the society in which one lives.”

  Speaking the idiom, wherever he was, ranked among Clinton’s greatest talents. By his second year in Fulbright’s shop he was a certified Hill rat who knew the lingo of the place, the tunnels and subway shortcuts, the lore, all the latest rumors and inside stories about LBJ and the frailties of senators who only a year earlier he had viewed as gods. He loved nothing more than to talk politics, and often on Fridays he would find his way over to the House office of freshman congressman David Pryor for late afternoon bull sessions. “Sometimes he’d bring a friend over and we’d just sit around and talk politics for an hour or so,” Pryor says. “He was inquisitive. He wanted to know why people did things and how the system worked.”

  Clinton’s manner with congressmen was similar in many respects to the way he dealt with professors: by showing a keen interest in their stories and special concerns, he gained insight and scored brownie points at the same time. But this was not necessarily the manipulation of a sycophant or social climber. His interest in people seemed egalitarian. His closest friend at work was Bertie Bowman, the fellow back room boy and former Senate janitor who was the only black on the foreign relations committee staff. They would talk all the time and sing duets together in the back room while they were working. Sometimes they would be walking down the hall together, running errands, singing “Blue Suede Shoes” or “Return to Sender” in harmony. They both liked Elvis. Bowman was sixteen years Clinton’s senior, yet their relationship transcended age and race. “He would say, ‘Come on, go here with me,’ and I’d say I had to check with my wife, and he’d say she can come, too,” Bowman later recalled. “Sometimes white folks invite you only to certain things, other things they don’t think of you. Bill would introduce me to whites as an equal, not as ‘Bertie’ and ‘Mister.’”

  His housemates on Potomac Avenue noticed another way in which Clinton had adapted to the Capitol Hill environment. He started being chronically late. Time in the world of Congress was a free-form concept: hearings started late, congressmen came and left and schmoozed as they pleased, only occasionally disciplined by the buzzer attached to their office clocks alerting them that a vote was imminent. The atmosphere was built around the notion that the rest of the world could wait. And so it became with Clinton. His friends would plan a dinner or dance and wait for Clinton to show up, and after an hour or two had gone by, he would arrive and say, “Oh, sorry, I was talking to somebody.” Usually, Tom Campbell would discover, Clinton had been talking to “some nincompoop about nothing.” Campbell, who had lived with Clinton for four years and knew his idiosyn-crasies, finally stopped expecting Clinton anywhere on time. “We would just say, ‘Here’s where we’re going, come when you get there.’ You could see him change during his time on the Hill where he met all those diverse people. He was always gone, always talking to people, always late.”

  Even as Clinton’s comings and goings grew tardy and unpredictable, his mind sought order in other ways. Rudiger Lowe, a German studying at Wesleyan University in Connecticut under a Fulbright scholarship, was taken aback by the preciseness of a letter he received from Clinton assigning him a topic at a Georgetown-sponsored student conference on the Atlantic Community. Clinton not only informed Lowe what his topic was and the specific length of his paper, but went on to suggest how it might be organized. Lowe’s topic was the US. role in unification efforts with Eastern Europe. Clinton outlined it with Roman numerals and a’s and b’s. It was the way Clinton took notes in class, and prefigured his style as a politician later, when he would respond to questions by breaking answers into points one, two, and three, or a, b, and c.

  On the eve of the conference, the Georgetown sponsors held a party for the European students in attendance. Clinton, who had studied German to fulfill his language requirement in the School of Foreign Service, ap-proached Lowe and inquired in German, “Are you the student from Germany?” They spent the rest of the party chatting in German. The next day Clinton asked Lowe whether he would like to meet Senator Fulbright. Lowe knew that “Fulbright was this great senator challenging LBJ,” and thought there would be little chance of getting to meet him. “But Clinton went out and made a phone call and came back and said, ‘We’re having breakfast with him tomorrow morning.’” Who is this fellow Clinton? Lowe began thinking to himself. Later in his tour of America, Lowe met Robert F. Kennedy and Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley (“How do you stay in power so long?” Lowe asked the big-city boss, to which Daley offered a chuckle), but for all the famous people he met in America that fall, he was most struck by the young organizer of the conference at Georgetown. He left the United States with an old German adage flashing in his mind about Bill Clinton: From this wood great politicians are carved.

  EVERY morning that November, Virginia Clinton asked the same question of her gravely ill husband: “Don’t you think we ought to call Bill?” The treatments had not worked. It was not radiation sickness but c
ancer that was ravaging his body. The fight that had finally won him the respect of his stepson was surely lost. Roger Clinton was dying fast. “Not yet,” he kept saying to his wife, until finally the morning came when he emerged from the bathroom and said, “It’s time”—and Virginia called her son Bill at Georgetown and had him fly home to Hot Springs.

  They had known each other for seventeen years now, Roger and Bill, since the boy was a four-year-old named Billy Blythe, then and always the prize of his mother’s life in a way that no other man could be. What Roger gave him other than a new last name and years of fear and anguish he was only now able to comprehend. He had seen the old man drink too much and beat his mother, and he had once wanted him gone; but now that the leavetaking would be forever, he started to understand why his mother had ignored his advice six years earlier when he had pleaded with her not to take Roger back. He came to realize that “somewhere deep down in-side,” Roger “could never understand what was good about himself,” and that when he drank too much, “all of his darkest fears would come out.” But Roger had always adored Bill. It had been apparent several times when Bill visited him at the hospital at Duke. Next to Bill, Roger felt inadequate. He was just an auto parts clerk with a drinking problem and cancer eating away at his face. He could not see any good in himself. But in his wife’s first son, who bore his name, he saw the promise of the world.

  The house at 213 Scully Street seemed like a hospital wing when Bill got home. Roger looked pitiful, his weight forty pounds below normal, his mouth constantly drooling. He was attended to day and night by volunteer nurses, Virginia’s friends and colleagues pulling eight-hour shifts. Doctors who had worked with Virginia shuttled in and out, reading charts, prescribing drugs, advising the family on how little time was left. Virginia would not enter the sick room to see her husband at the end. She did not want to because “it was not a pretty sight to see.”