First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  The boy-in-the-tree story hovered around Clinton for several years, until finally it was transformed into a joke by the journalists who covered him in later campaigns. One year, the press association in northwest Arkansas presented a satirical Gridiron show that included a skit in which Clinton was on trial as the boy in the tree and was found innocent based on “butt prints.”

  Rumors about Clinton’s sexual behavior also began in that first campaign. As a bachelor, he was immune from charges of marital infidelity, but little else. John Baran, who had taught Clinton art in junior high school, heard rumors at his church, Grand Avenue Methodist of Hot Springs, during the final months of the congressional campaign that “Bill was a homosexual.” Some of the same churchgoers spreading that story would later attack Clinton for living with a woman before he was married. Mary Lee Fray attended a Baptist church in Fayetteville where Clinton was criticized from the pulpit. She quickly learned that “some conservative preachers were crusading against him. They were constantly talking about drugs and women in the Clinton campaign.” Nearly every week, Paul Fray would field a call from a labor organizer in Fort Smith who would utter the same lament. “We’re catching hell down here about all you leftwing dope smokers up there at that damn yoo-nah-ver-sity, Paul. We’re just catchin’ hell down here!” Neil McDonald, a Clinton volunteer, was frequently confronted by hostile questioners who wanted to know about women and the campaign. “They were trying to pin Bill down on the women issue or anything else they could find. They would ask if Clinton was dating women out of the campaign. Most of us knew better than to answer that one.”

  Several office affairs bloomed at the College Avenue headquarters, but they seemed more a reflection of the sexually combustible nature of political campaigns than of any loosening of sexual mores among the under-thirty generation. There was a discussion once among Clinton advisers about taking the offensive and resurrecting a slogan that cropped up during Hammerschmidt’s first campaign: “Send John Paul to Washington, the wife you save may be your own.” That idea was proposed by Paul Fray, but vetoed by Rodham, according to Doug Wallace. “Paul wanted to play hardball, cut and slash. Hillary did not like it.”

  The campaign was not a haven for the drug culture, but neither was it a marijuana-free zone. Randy White, a college freshman who joined the campaign as a volunteer, was sent to work at a phone bank one night at an apartment in Fayetteville. When he entered the apartment, he saw “seven or eight people in there smoking pot.” He felt “terrified that the place would be busted” while he worked through his list of calls in another room. Whenever eighteen-year-old Roger Clinton, the candidate’s younger brother, came up to Fayetteville, the scent of marijuana trailed him. “It was no secret Roger was blowing smoke,” recalled Neil McDonald. “It ain’t too hard to tell when you go into a room that Roger had just been in, and it smells like burnt rope. He and his buddies would be in the basement stenciling signs, and actually smoking joints.” McDonald thought that Clinton knew that Roger was smoking pot in 1974. “Bill… tried to lecture him in a big-brotherly way.”

  INSIDE the Clinton campaign, Addington was known as “Ronnie Paul,” Wallace was “Dougie,” Fray was “P.D.,” and they all called Clinton “the Boy.” “The Boy’s on a roll today,” they would say. Or, “The Boy’s in a pisser of a mood.”

  The nickname was in part complimentary: it evoked Clinton’s youth, friendliness, and achievement. But it also had a subtext that addressed the immature aspects of his personality. The Boy never wanted to go to bed. The Boy had no concept of money. Once, early in the campaign, he called Addington and announced that he had to come over to Addington’s apartment to take a shower and shave because he had forgotten to pay his utility bills and his water and power had been turned off.

  The Boy had a tendency to talk too much and could not always be trusted to keep campaign matters in confidence. One day he told reporters about internal poll results, prompting Doug Wallace and David Ivey, the two aides in charge of press matters, to issue a blistering memo that was labeled “To all Distrist Headquarters Staff,” but was directed primarily at Clinton. “The damage done by the release of the last poll without the accompanying previous poll can only be judged after some time, but it is obvious that it has hurt,” they wrote. “From now until the time Bill Clinton finishes this campaign, NO ONE will talk, or even breathe in the direction of a news reporter, without first clearing it with David Ivey or Doug Wallace. THIS ALSO MEANS THE CANDIDATE.” If Clinton ignored this edict, they declared, “All hell will break loose.”

  The Boy was sentimental and easily touched. He was near tears one day when he received a fifty-dollar contribution from two friends from Yale Law School who had little money. “It’s like the widow’s mite,” Clinton said, comparing the contribution to the biblical story of the widow who gave more than she could afford at the temple, the smallest denomination of coin, a mite, which prompted Jesus to say that her contribution was worth more than all the riches donated by the wealthy.

  The Boy could throw a fit when he felt frustrated. His temper was an accepted part of the campaign. There were testy notes if he thought the follow-through on something was not quick enough. He would explode in a flash, then act as though it had never happened. Neil McDonald witnessed some of Clinton’s explosions: “There was a minor snafu and he blew off at us for no reason. But most of us knew better than to take it personally. He was under a great deal of stress.” Harry Truman Moore, a law student who often traveled with Clinton and served as his photographer, remembered that Clinton would often snap at his travel aides when they tried to pull him away from a crowd to keep him closer to his schedule. “He’d say, ‘Don’t ever pull me away from a crowd like that again!’ Then, ten minutes later, he’d say, ‘Why are we late?’ We’d all get used to it, the Clinton temper.”

  His most memorable eruptions came in arguments with Rodham, who seemed not the least bit timid about snapping back when he erupted. “They’d have the biggest damn fights, shouting and swearing,” Addington recalled. “They had two or three battle royals.” One day Addington, Clinton, and Rodham were starting out on their way to an event in Eureka Springs. Clinton and Rodham were debating how to handle a campaign issue. “Bill wanted to do one thing, she wanted to do another. They started shouting at each other. I was driving. Bill was in the front seat, Hillary in the back. He was hitting the dashboard. She was hitting the seat. They were really going at it. We drove up a street near the headquarters and stopped at a light. Hillary said, ‘I’m getting out!’ She got out and slammed the door. And Bill said, ‘Go on.’ We got out on the highway and I was going fast because we were late. Bill started venting his anger on me. It was one of the most uncomfortable times I’ve ever spent with him. Then he took a short nap. When he woke up, everything was fine.”

  Rodham was a central figure during the final weeks of the campaign. She was, thought Mary Lee Fray, “fighting for her man” romantically and politically. After sending Clinton’s University of Arkansas girlfriend into exile (the young woman was not seen around the campaign from October through election day), Rodham took on several aides whose style she disapproved of, especially Addington and Paul Fray. Addington, who was sent to the Fort Smith office, came to think of Rodham as a negative force. “Our organization went to shit. We lost the spirit because of her. Everybody started bickering with everybody else,” he said later. In a memo to Clinton, Doug Wallace noted that though he thought Rodham’s “intentions were the best,” her presence was more negative than positive. “She… rubs people the wrong way, and boy, did she ever,” Wallace wrote. “She managed to antagonize almost the entire staff.…”

  Most of Rodham’s bickering was with Paul Fray, a strongwilled political operator accustomed to playing a dominant role. It is an understatement to say that their styles clashed. “Paul was rough around the edges in how he dealt with people, real colorful and country, and that style didn’t mesh too well when Hillary was around,” Wallace recalled. The power strugg
le between Rodham and Fray reached a critical stage near the end when they got into several arguments over money. The campaign needed more funds to compete with Hammerschmidt on television and to ensure a strong get-out-the-vote effort, but Rodham advised against borrowing too much or taking it from questionable sources. In one instance, according to the accounts of Fray and several other campaign aides, Rodham took the ethical high ground, Clinton vacillated, and Fray was willing to do whatever it took to win. Fray says that he was contacted by a lawyer representing dairy interests who had $15,000 ready for the campaign that could be used in Sebastian County “to ensure that you are able to win the election.” The implication was that the money was dirty coming and going: it would come from the dairy industry with expectations that if Clinton became congressman he would serve their interests, and it would go to election boxes in Fort Smith where votes could still be bought. In several parts of Arkansas in those days, voters still cast paper ballots that went into cardboard boxes. There were frequent allegations that different boxes were stuffed and that payoffs were required to prevent stuffing. “The attorney already had the money,” Fray said later. “It was a question of me picking it up and delivering it. I knew there were places where we could spend a little money and it would turn out right.”

  At a late night meeting at headquarters, Fray discussed the deal with Clinton and Rodham. Clinton did not have much to say. Rodham flatly rejected the proposal. “She nixed it,” according to Fray. “She got adamant. She said to Bill, ‘No! You don’t want to be a party to this!’ I said, ‘Look, you want to win or you want to lose?’ She said, ‘Well, I don’t want to win this way.’ If we can’t earn it, we can’t go [to Washington].ߣ”

  ON November 5, election night, the mood was buoyant at Clinton headquarters. Any disputes within the campaign seemed inconsequential compared with the energy and enthusiasm that Clinton had put into his candidacy, and now it was as though that energy was all that mattered. Reports from the field indicated that the race was close and that Clinton had the momentum. He had been out there traveling the back roads for eight months, while Hammerschmidt, slow to realize the seriousness of the challenge, had been back in the district only for the final three weeks. The campaign had election teams stationed in the courthouses in all twenty-one counties, calling in reports box by box. Fray and Clinton had determined the minimum number of votes they figured they needed in each rural county to overtake what they expected to be a significant Hammerschmidt edge in Fort Smith. They tallied the results on a large tracking board. Hammerschmidt’s totals were on the left side of the board, Clinton’s on the right. The early results were encouraging. Rodham sat at a desk working a calculator. Fray stood by the tally board analyzing the numbers as Harry Truman Moore wrote them down. Clinton worked the phone, taking and making calls to the counties. He started getting concerned when the calls came from Garland County, which included his home town of Hot Springs. They knew that Garland County was conservative, but assumed that the favorite son could at least break even there. “What the hell’s going on down there?” Clinton asked. Somehow, he had lost Garland County.

  By midnight, every county had reported except the largest and most conservative one, Sebastian County, home to Fort Smith. Clinton was still leading by several thousand votes. Steve Smith was thinking about finding an apartment in Georgetown. But what was happening down in Fort Smith? Clinton supporters at the Sebastian County courthouse were picking up reports of vote tampering. “Let me call the sheriff,” Clinton said. “He’s a friend of mine.” The sheriff told Clinton he was looking into it. Steve Smith and several other aides piled into a car and drove to Fort Smith. Ron Addington met them at the courthouse, and they milled around for a while, grumbling, but determined that there was nothing they could do and drove back to Fayetteville. Fort Smith finally came in with an enormous swing in Hammerschmidt’s direction. The board showed that Clinton had lost by 6,000 votes. Fray started swearing and throwing things out the window. “It was the goddamn money?” he said.

  The staff talked about challenging the election results, but Clinton chose not to. He realized that he had won for losing. His race was the most talked about contest in the state. He had become the darling of the Democratic party by taking on Hammerschmidt and coming within 2 percentage points of defeating him, by far the best showing any opponent ever made against him. He had been on the same stage with Dale Bumpers and David Pryor and compared favorably to them. “We accomplished a miracle out here,” Clinton told his staff. “We started with no name recognition and look what we accomplished. We scared the pants off that guy.” He then sent a telegram to Hammerschmidt: “Congratulations on your victory yesterday. I hope you will consider the merit of the positive positions I took during the campaign. They grew out of the long months of discussions I had with our people. I wish you well in the next two difficult years. If ever I can be of service to you in your attempts to help the people of the Third Congressional District, please call on me.”

  • • •

  ONE morning after the election, Clinton drove to the square in downtown Fayetteville and started shaking hands. “Thank you for your help,” he said to passers-by who had voted for him. To others, he expressed thanks simply for voting, or for listening to him. He stood in the square all day, talking and shaking hands. He was cooling down after nine months of nonstop campaigning, his friends thought. No, there was more to it than that. He was warming up. The next race had already begun.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  GOVERNOR-IN-WAITING

  GARY HART OF Colorado arrived in the Senate. Jerry Brown became the new governor of California. Michael Dukakis took over in Massachusetts. Paul Simon of Illinois, Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, and Tom Harkin of Iowa were elected to the House of Representatives. All of these Democrats were set on the path of presidential ambition by the elections of 1974. They were among the winners in what came to be regarded as a transformational year in modern American politics, a year when the old order started to give way to the next generation. The most dramatic change took place in the House, where ninety-two freshmen, including seventy-five Democrats, stormed Capitol Hill. They were known as the Watergate class or the Watergate babies. With equal measures of impatience and righteousness, they undertook the work of institutional reform, changing the rules of the place, upsetting the seniority system, overthrowing old committee chairmen, demanding a share of the power.

  The road of ifs usually leads nowhere, but in the case of Bill Clinton and 1974 a brief journey down the path of historical speculation seems appropriate. If four thousand people in the Third Congressional District had voted for him instead of for John Paul Hammerschmidt, Clinton would have been one of the rambunctious Watergate babies. He would have moved to Washington that winter, meaning that his stay in Arkansas, the land to which he had always said he longed to return, would have lasted a mere sixteen months. Hillary Rodham, after four months in Fayetteville, certainly would have left with him, resettling in a place and a culture where they were on more equal standing and where she could pursue her interests in politics and law on a national rather than provincial stage. While the removal of geography as an issue might have made it smoother for the partnership in the short term, it is also conceivable that life in Washington eventually would have unraveled the couple’s relationship by making them less dependent on each other than they would become during their long haul in Arkansas.

  Everything in Clinton’s history leads to the conclusion that he would have emerged as a leader of the Watergate babies in Congress, impressing his colleagues on Capitol Hill if not always his constituents back in Arkansas. In settings where he found himself among high-powered peers, whether with the Rhodes Scholars at Oxford or, much later, with the governors of other states, Clinton rose quickly to prominence, outpacing others with his ambition, affability, and appetite for ideas and dealmaking. But where would that have taken him in Washington? To a House committee chairmanship, eventually, or more likely, given his restless e
lectoral nature, to a bid for a Senate seat, either in 1978 or in 1980, when he would have to challenge Dale Bumpers. Bumpers and Governor Pryor, who also had senatorial ambitions, were always there ahead of Clinton, two formidable vote-getters in his own party. Had he gone to Washington in 1974, at some point he would have been unable to repress an urge to try to run over one of them; instead, from back in Arkansas, he found a way around them.

  Losing the congressional election did not hurt Clinton’s political status in Arkansas, and enhanced his image as an emerging star of the Democratic party. He came out of the contest with what all politicians covet—an aura of inevitability. The question was not whether he would run again, but what office he would seek. By early 1975, he was weighing two options: challenging Hammerschmidt again or running for attorney general. While resuming his teaching at the law school, he maintained his political contacts around the district and solicited advice on which election path to follow. Doug Wallace, his press secretary during the congressional campaign, wrote a memo outlining the potential dangers of another race against Hammerschmidt. The attorney general’s race, on the other hand, seemed “very attractive with relatively few drawbacks,” beyond its paltry annual salary. “The office of attorney general would allow you to work on consumer affairs, white collar crime, energy matters and other issues of interest,” Wallace wrote. “It would also provide a proving ground for the future by giving you the experience in government that some people in 1974 said you lacked.”