First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  “This morning as I drove up Highway 7 from Hot Springs in the breath-taking beauty of our Arkansas spring,” Clinton said, “I thought of all the long roads so many of us have walked together, up and down this river valley—not just through the main towns, but also to the hamlets of which so many others are dimly aware—to Houston, Casa and Adona; Havana, Briggsville and Chickalah; Coal Hill, Hartman and Lamar; Hector, Appleton and Dover and more. I know them all because they are home to me, because of you. I believe there is an unbreakable bond between us and I have tried to keep faith with it…. Now I need you once more to fight another battle. If you will do it, it will be an exhilarating reaffirmation of the work to which I have given the fullest measure of my time and strength and spirit.”

  Some bonds were less unbreakable than others. When Clinton appeared before the state AFL-CIO convention in Hot Springs in April, the convention hall rustled with rumors that he considered organized labor support a mixed blessing and wanted to shed his image as a tool of the trade unions. In 1974, at that same convention, Clinton had received rousing standing ovations and an endorsement that helped him get through the congressional primary, and in his general election campaign against Hammerschmidt trade union contributions accounted for 25 percent of his treasury. But now, only two years later, he lost the endorsement by rejecting labor’s litmus test: he refused to sign a petition to place an amendment on the November ballot calling for repeal of the state’s right-to-work law. State labor leaders considered Clinton’s action a gratuitous political ploy in which he used labor to revise his public image in a southern, agrarian state that lacked a strong union tradition. It was a characterization which Doug Wallace, who once again served as Clinton’s press secretary, did not dispute. “There was a sense that labor was not that critical to the attorney general’s race,” Wallace said later. “And we had to move away from the 1974 image.”

  Clinton’s strategic straight-arming of labor at the 1976 convention is important to an understanding of his political evolution. First, it shows that he was adjusting to what he perceived as the temper of the time. In one labor questionnaire in which Clinton explained his refusal to support repeal of the right-to-work law, he argued that “this is a bad time because our people generally are in a conservative mood.” Second, it set a precedent that Clinton would follow throughout his career: to demonstrate independence, he would rebuke traditional allies, from labor leaders who wanted union shops to schoolteachers who opposed teacher testing to African American leaders who would not repudiate a rap singer’s militant remarks. There was a certain fail-safe method to Clinton’s rebukes: they were directed at groups who had fallen out of public favor.

  That is not to say that Clinton’s political positioning was one-dimensional. If he reacted to the public sentiment in 1976, he also studied it with intensity. Sensing a prevailing mood of disillusionment, he began writing out his thoughts on yellow legal pads, and eventually put them together in a series of speeches. At the graduation ceremonies for political science majors at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro on April 27, he defended the profession of politics and noted that he had “devoted twelve years to becoming well educated, well disciplined and well motivated in politics,” only to arrive on the political scene at a time when “most people believe that politicians are either corruptible, weak or ineffective.” He still believed that politics could be “honorable and important work,” he said, but worried that the public was losing faith and interest because of the disconnected nature of modern American culture.

  In one speech at a bicentennial celebration in Ashdown, he identified television as a villain. “More and more, especially in our cities, people withdraw in their nonwork hours, to the isolation of their TV rooms, where for hours on end they can pass the time without having to feel, without having to take the initiative to be creative and to improve their lives,” Clinton said. The resentment that people expressed against their government, he reasoned, was “a reflection of the bitterness they felt about themselves and their inability to change.” How to change things? Clinton offered regular town meetings as one solution. “Although they would almost surely be sparsely attended at first, they can be the beginnings of a new involvement.”

  On primary day, May 26, Clinton avoided a runoff by amassing 55.6 percent of the vote against Jernigan and Cash. He carried all but four Arkansas counties and trounced his opponents in the Third Congressional District. He thought he might take every ballot in Newton County, one of his favorite pockets along the Buffalo River in the Ozarks, where he had talked to almost every voter, but settled for nine out of ten, vowing that next time he would win over the seventy-three people who chose Jernigan and the eighty-one who preferred Cash.

  As his thirtieth birthday approached, Clinton traveled to Hope and walked the paths of Rose Hill Cemetery to the grave of William Jefferson Blythe, the father he never knew. He thought to himself, he said later, about how he had passed another milestone that his father, killed at twenty-eight, never reached. That Blythe died at such an early age haunted Clinton and made him anxious, despite all that he had accomplished. He had his first elected post locked up, he was mixing with the richest and most powerful people in Arkansas, he was the golden boy of the state Democratic party, and yet he still felt “an urgent sense to do everything” he could in life as quickly as possible. He had grown up, subconsciously, on his father’s timetable and felt that in some ways he was living for both of them. If he was not obsessed with death, mortality was never too far from his mind. He was “acutely aware that you never really know how much time you have.”

  Clinton paused at one point on his birthday to write a note to Betsey Wright in Washington. “All is madness here,” he exclaimed to his friend from the Texas McGovern campaign. Without a general election of his own to worry about, he signed up to work for the presidential campaign of fellow southerner Jimmy Carter. He indicated to Wright that he could not arouse much animosity toward Gerald Ford, but felt freer to attack the Republicans “now that the biggest prick in Congress is on the ticket”—a reference, presumably, to Ford’s runningmate, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas.

  At a meeting in Atlanta with Tim Kraft, Carter’s national coordinator, Clinton was invited to run the Texas operation again. But it made no sense for him to work outside Arkansas in the months before he would take over as attorney general. He declined the offer and stayed home, where as Carter’s state chairman he could prepare for his new job and build more contacts for his political rise. Hillary Rodham felt no similar compunction to stay on in Arkansas. After a vacation with Clinton in Spain, she took a leave from the law school and left for Indianapolis, where she served as Carter’s state field director through the November election.

  The effort in Arkansas could not have been more different from what Clinton had gone through for McGovern in Texas four years earlier. Whereas in Texas, Clinton was constantly on the defensive, mediating factional disputes, trying to interpret a northern liberal to a southern conservative electorate, facing a hostile rebellion from the business establishment, this time he had a candidate who was from the same southern culture and who was on intimate terms with the key financial players in the state. Georgia, like Arkansas, was a major poultry center, which led to a strong connection between Carter and Don Tyson. Tyson raised tens of thousands of dollars for Carter within the poultry industry. Even more valuable were Carter’s personal ties to Jackson Stephens, head of Stephens Inc., the largest investment bond firm outside Wall Street and the most politically potent financial enterprise in the state. Stephens, a conservative who often supported Republicans on the national level, had been Carter’s classmate at the Naval Academy. When Carter visited Little Rock, he stayed at Stephens’s house. Stephens’s son-in-law, Craig Campbell, worked side by side with Clinton on the Carter campaign. And, of course, the biggest difference of all with the McGovern campaign was that Carter won, in Clinton’s state and in the nation.

  LITTLE Rock was a new world for the new attorney gene
ral and his wife, as different from Fayetteville as Fayetteville had been from New Haven and Washington. Fayetteville was informal and collegial, more progressive than the rest of the state, a town of easy friendships. Little Rock was more formal, striving to be a little Dallas, with stratified social sets, a city of country clubs and debutante balls and corporate lunches. Rodham and Clinton found a small house in the historic Hillcrest neighborhood to the west of the state Capitol and cultivated another circle of friends in government and law. The transition was more dramatic for Rodham. She went from directing a legal aid clinic at a state university to practicing law at the Rose Law Firm, the oldest and most traditional legal house in Arkansas, with an impressive roster of deep-pocket corporate clients. Law school colleagues were reluctant to lose Rodham, whom they considered a future star (“Divorce him and stay here!” her colleague Mort Gitelman had said jokingly one day), but financial and political considerations ruled out a commuter marriage. As much as Clinton and Rodham enjoyed the relaxed style of living in Fayetteville, there were names to be made in Little Rock.

  There was never any doubt that the attorney general’s office was nothing more than a brief stop on the road for Clinton. When raising money for the election, his supporters promoted his grander intentions. H. T. Moore, who had worked on Clinton’s congressional campaign as a law student in Fayetteville and then set up a law practice in the town of Paragould in northeast Arkansas, sent out fundraising letters for the attorney general’s race with the message that it would be smart to “get on board early.” It was accepted that Clinton, when he arrived in Little Rock, was the governor-in-waiting.

  The attorney general’s job played to his strengths. He could position himself as a populist, give speeches, travel, expound on the state code, shape broad policy decisions, and he did not have to spend much time behind a desk making difficult decisions on appointments and programs that might antagonize people. He created the position of chief of staff and gave the job to a nonlawyer, Steve Smith. Lawyers who had worked for Clinton’s predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, detected a change in the office when Clinton arrived. Although Tucker, who left for a seat in Congress, was a political animal, Clinton was more of one. He seized on one of the populist issues of the day, utility rates, and created a division of energy conservation and rate advocacy with double the previous litigation staff. He challenged the telephone companies when they raised the pay-phone rates to a quarter and often appeared at hearings to cross-examine utility officials.

  Clinton and Rodham now found even more networks open to them. They made the extended guest list for dinners at the Carter White House, and Clinton was summoned to Washington occasionally for national briefings. As the state Democrat most closely associated with Carter, he was given an informal role reviewing all federal patronage appointments from Arkansas. When a vacancy arose, Carter named Rodham to the board of the Legal Services Corporation, and she quickly became its chairwoman. Clinton developed a friendship with Eddie Sutton, coach of the University of Arkansas basketball team. They would talk about the similarities of their two professions: in politics and basketball alike, you battle all the time and you get immediate results.

  All in all, Clinton seemed delighted with himself in his first elected job. He had his own office with his own staff and his own private quarters. On the inside door of his private bathroom, he put up a life-sized poster of fleshily abundant Dolly Parton in a skimpy outfit. Terry Kirkpatrick, who worked in the criminal division of the attorney general’s office, spotted Clinton ambling down the hallway one night when she was staying late to write a brief. “He was just walking around, looking in all the offices, like he was surveying his fiefdom. He had a big grin on his face.” After encountering Kirkpatrick, Clinton strolled into the office of another assistant, Joe Purvis, who had been his friend since they attended nursery school together in Hope. “He put his feet on my desk, which means they were on top of a pile of papers,” Purvis later recalled. “He offered me a stick of gum. I think I said, ‘What in the hell do you want?’ It was like, say what you came to say and get the hell out. Bill said, ‘I said, are you having fun? If you’re not having fun, it becomes just work, and it’s time to move on to something else.’”

  Clinton was having fun, yet thinking about moving on to something else at the same time. Rising to the position of attorney general of Arkansas would not be enough to place an asterisk next to his name in the billion pages of the book of life, the goal he had set for himself in a letter to Denise Hyland long ago. Thoughts of premature death came back to him again three days before his thirty-first birthday. On August 16, 1977, he was in Fort Smith to deliver a speech when he heard that Elvis Presley had died. Elvis was more than a slick-haired crooner in the Clinton family culture. He was a cherished icon. Clinton’s mother idolized Elvis and Bill, two southern charmers with sleepy eyes and soft voices and talents beyond their backwater roots. Clinton memorized the lyrics to many of Elvis’s songs as a teenager, and even during the sixties, when the King seemed out of style, there was some part of Clinton that held on to that corner of his past. Elvis’s death left Clinton transfixed. He visited the home of a longtime supporter, Marilyn Speed, after his speech, and did not want to leave and miss any of the television coverage. Terry Kirkpatrick, who traveled with him that day, remembered that the end of Elvis was all her boss would talk about: “All the way home on the plane he talked about it. He talked about the passing of an era. His youth. What a wasted life. It moved him deeply.”

  EARLY that fall of 1977, Clinton’s chief of staff, Steve Smith, placed a call to a young political consultant in New York named Richard Morris who had been soliciting new clients around the country and had some novel ideas about how polls could be used to shape rhetorical arguments in campaigns. Morris flew down to Little Rock and met with Clinton at the attorney general’s office. At that meeting, according to Morris, Clinton said that he had a difficult decision to make about whether to run for governor or senator. He said he could “walk into the governor’s office” if he wanted to, but that he would rather be a senator and wanted to run for the seat being vacated by John L. McClellan. Part of it had to do with length of tenure, he told Morris: governors had to run every two years while senators were safe for six. He also felt there were more challenges in Washington. But the problem was that he was not sure he could win the Senate primary. Two Democratic congressmen, Jim Guy Tucker and Ray Thornton, were already in the race, and it seemed likely that Governor Pryor would join them.

  Morris agreed to do a poll for Clinton on the two races. The results showed that Clinton could win the governorship with no problem, and he “could probably win” the Senate race, though it would be an iffy proposition, Morris said. The problem was not Pryor. The poll found that Pryor was likable but not electable and would fade in a tough primary “against a young charismatic candidate.” This was contrary to the conventional wisdom of the time, which held that Pryor was the strongest candidate. Clinton was impressed by Morris’s conclusions. He felt the same way, he said. But he was still nervous about the Senate race. He said that he would probably run for governor, depending on what Pryor decided.

  A few weeks later, Pryor invited Clinton to ride with him from the state Capitol to Hot Springs, where the governor was to deliver a speech. Clinton had been seeking a private meeting where the two men could talk about their political futures, and Pryor decided that now was the time. They sat in the back seat of the state-owned Lincoln and chatted all the way down and back, and then went on to the Governor’s Mansion and talked some more. At the start of the discussion, Pryor could not tell whether Clinton wanted to run for senator or governor. He made the first move. “I told him that I was planning to run for the Senate,” Pryor recalled. He said he hoped Clinton would not join the already crowded field. Clinton “opened up” to Pryor as the conversation progressed. With Bumpers and Pryor both ahead of him, he said, he feared that he might find his career stymied.

  “Bill,” Pryor told Clinton, seeking
to reassure him, “you could run for governor and be elected and serve longer than Orval Faubus,” who was in the Governor’s Mansion for six two-year terms from 1955 to 1967. “You could break Faubus’s record” For the rest of the conversation, Clinton asked Pryor questions about what it was like to be governor. He did not say what was really on his mind: he would settle for governor, this time, but he had no interest in breaking Faubus’s record in Little Rock.

  From the moment Clinton announced for governor, he began running two campaigns at once. In public, he was the candidate for governor, facing token opposition in the Democratic primary against four relative unknowns. He easily garnered support from labor and business, and was hailed as “the only truly distinguished figure” in the field by the Arkansas Gazette, though the editorial writers there occasionally upbraided him for being too cautious. His opponents assaulted him for using the attorney general’s office “as a political tool,” for “never working a day in his life,” and for having an assertive wife who would not use his last name. Internal campaign news summaries frequently noted that “the Name business,” as they called it, had surfaced in stories about Hillary Rodham. One candidate, Monroe Schwarzlose, an old turkey farmer, harrumphed about Rodham’s law degree. “We’ve had enough lawyers in the Governor’s Mansion,” he said. “One is enough. Two would be too much.” Another candidate, Frank Lady, blasted Rodham, saying there was an inherent conflict of interest between her membership in the Rose Law Firm and her position as the governor’s wife.