First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  ON his first official trip in office, Clinton took a chartered flight to northwest Arkansas for a series of appearances in Fort Smith, the conservative military town, where most voters regarded him skeptically. When he arrived at the terminal, he turned to his travel aide, Randy White, and asked, “What are we doing? What’s the story?” White, who had secured a job in the governor’s office after serving as student manager for the Arkansas basketball team coached by Clinton’s friend, Eddie Sutton, pulled out a schedule. “I know the schedule,” Clinton snapped. “Where’s the briefing book?” White was at a loss. There was no briefing book. Clinton’s face reddened and he slammed his fist on the counter. “God damn it!” he fumed. “When we go somewhere, you’ve got to know who we’re meeting with and what’s going on and what grants the county is getting!”

  As Clinton “pounded like crazy” on the counter, White thought to himself, “Oh, shit!” This was the first test of his job and he had flubbed it. Clinton wanted to know everything and White knew next to nothing. Terrified, he found a telephone and placed a call back to his boss, Rudy Moore, Jr., the aide in charge of day-to-day administration of the governor’s office. Calm down, Moore told him: things would get straightened out, and in any case the mess-up was not the travel aide’s responsibility. White feared that Clinton would remain mad at him all day, but as soon as they left the air terminal, the anger vanished, replaced by a compulsive urge to mingle and tell stories. “Whenever we’d pass something, he’d have a story,” White recalled later. “We’d drive through a precinct and he’d say, ’Oh, I lost this box 48 to 175, and then go on to explain why he’d lost it. Then we’d pass by a store and he’d say, ‘Oh, stop here’ for Miss so-and-so, ‘I’ve known her forever.’ He’d go in and drink a Coke and stay. It went all day like this. Good Lord, we were off schedule. Way off.” Finally, late in the day, White called back to Little Rock again. Now Moore was mad. Several questions had come up back at the office that needed Clinton’s consideration, Moore said. In the future, they should never go that long without checking in. It was White’s first trip, and he “caught it from both ends.”

  Randy White’s predicament on that initial trip to Fort Smith came to symbolize much of the frustration and confusion in the governor’s office during Clinton’s first term. Catching it from both ends was all too common for a staff whose boss was both extremely demanding and exceedingly lax, and who could seem, at the same time, obsessively in touch and yet remote. To the outside world, it often appeared that the governor’s aides during that first term were getting him in trouble and letting him down. But the staffs mistakes in large measure reflected Clinton’s loose, free-ranging management style, his conflicted personality, and his urge to be all things to all people.

  A few months into his tenure, Clinton gained a reputation that seemed contrary to his political nature. Legislators, lobbyists, and citizens began voicing complaints that they were having difficulty getting through to him. How could this be? How could this obsessively gregarious politician suddenly become isolated? Most attributed it to an overprotective staff. At Clinton’s urging, visitors from other parts of the state showed up at the governor’s office only to be turned away by aides. Powerful state senators fumed at a letter in which Rudy Moore said that they should see him if they wanted to deal with Clinton. Labor leader J. Bill Becker groused that Clinton was “insulated by staff people.” But most of these problems resulted from a classic Clinton paradox: his eagerness to please people often ended up angering them; wanting to be open, he ended up appearing closed.

  “Clinton was so friendly, people would come up to him on the road and say, ‘I’ve got a problem and I need to talk to you,’ and Clinton would say, ‘Well, if you’ll be in Little Rock next week, come by my office’—and they would,” Moore recalled. “Then he wouldn’t be in or he’d have someone else scheduled or he’d tell us to handle it. So expectations would be raised and people would be disappointed.” The worse the problem became, the harder it was for Clinton to appreciate that he was the principal cause of it. His solution was to beef up his scheduling staff and complain more about his overcrowded schedule. Not long after Randy White was moved to scheduling, he received a note from Clinton saying that too many people were getting through the system to see him.

  “I have no time to be governor!” Clinton lamented. White responded with a two-page memo that began: “Grab this week’s schedule and let’s review it.” Every person on the schedule, White noted, was someone with whom Clinton had agreed to meet. “Anyone who could get through and whine to him, he’d let them through,” White said later. “And then he’d blame it on me.”

  One reason many people could not reach Clinton at the governor’s office was that he was not there when he was expected to be. His tendency to straggle and talk to anyone who wanted to talk to him had reached the point by 1979 that his staff operated by what they called Clinton time. They would often lie to him about when he was due somewhere, giving him an earlier time than the actual one, hoping that might keep him on schedule, but by the end of a day he could still be an hour or two behind. Some appointments were more important not to be late for than others, but Clinton was egalitarian in that regard: he could be as late for a meeting with high-rolling corporate executives as for one with poor farmers. Once, when the state’s powerful poultry barons were upset about a tax proposal, Clinton’s staff arranged a summit meeting in the governor’s office. The hostility that they brought with them to Little Rock only increased once they reached Room 250 and were asked to wait in the lobby until Clinton returned. He finally arrived two hours late.

  After the tense meeting, Clinton raged at his scheduling staff, blaming them for the disaster. The session with the poultry executives, he grumbled, was not on his schedule. “You back off!” Rudy Moore told him. “You’re wrong. You were late!”

  The habit was never broken, but eventually Clinton’s aides learned to accept it with gallows humor. Randy White noticed an advertisement in the newspaper that seemed especially aimed at Clinton. “Will you commit larceny today?” the ad asked. “You could be stealing from someone important to you. If you steal time, someone else suffers.” Readers were urged to tear out the ad and “hand it to a thief.” White gave it to Clinton, who laughed. On another occasion the governor’s receptionist sent a note to Rudy Moore warning him that an uninvited and potentially dangerous visitor was in the building. “Security downstairs holding guy in their office who said he was sent here to kill the Gov.,” her note read. Moore took the note and sent it on to White in scheduling with this deadpan notation: “RW—see if you can work him in.”

  HE was thirty-three, and his nicknames had regressed from the juvenile to the infantile. Where during his Fayetteville days he was sometimes referred to as “Wonder Boy” or “the Boy,” he now occasionally answered to “Baby”—as in “Baby’s getting too big for his britches,” or “Maybe Baby’s growing up!”—a monicker given to him by Frances Walls, a longtime Democratic activist in northeast Arkansas. Even a friendly cartoonist portrayed the child governor riding around on a tricycle or peering from the turret of a tank. “It was not easy for a boy to lead in such a conservative state,” reflected Ray Smith, Jr., a Hot Springs legislator who had counseled young Clinton on politics. “To be led by a child, well, Alexander made it, but Jesus didn’t.”

  Clinton had no chief of staff. Three executive assistants held nearly equal status. They were young, liberal, and hirsute, and became known as “the Three Beards,” the leaders of the Children’s Crusade. Moore, the oldest at thirty-five, took the lead in politics and legislative matters. Steve Smith, who was Moore’s former seatmate in the Arkansas legislature, supervised the governor’s dealings with state agencies and economic development. Smith had entered the legislature at the dawn of the seventies at the minimum age of twenty-one. Now, after pursuing a doctoral degree in communications and working for Clinton in the attorney general’s office, he was a veteran of state political wars and still only twenty-
nine. The third beard belonged to John Danner, thirty-one, who oversaw state-federal relations and long-term planning and took delight in thrashing about in the vast ocean of policy ideas. At his most enthusiastic, Danner, a Berkeley Law School graduate, would march into a meeting with a roll of butcher paper, unroll thirty feet, tape it to a wall, and swiftly write out ten new ideas for the Clinton administration before anyone else in the room could think of one. He and his wife, Nancy Pietrafesa, who also worked in the governor’s office and went by the nickname “Peach,” had met Clinton and Rodham during the Yale years and were two out-of-state friends who heeded the generational call and moved to Little Rock.

  Of the triumvirate, only Rudy Moore survived the two years. Danner and Pietrafesa’s stay in Arkansas was short and stressful, marked by constant friction with other aides. When a staff revolt made it obvious that Clinton had to ask them to leave, he could not bring himself to fire them personally and asked Rudy Moore to do it. Smith also left before the term was over, and, like Danner, he left in a way that revealed as much about Clinton as about himself.

  As Clinton came to power, one of the high-profile public issues was the clear-cutting of forests by the giant timber companies, especially Weyerhaeuser, a Pacific Coast-based firm that had arrived in Arkansas earlier in the decade and was leveling forest tracts in the Ouachita Mountains and along the route from Little Rock to Clinton’s home town of Hot Springs. Aside from the scientific debate about whether clear-cutting (in which acres of timberland were bulldozed at one time) harmed the wildlife and created pollution runoff problems, the practice enraged citizens driving along scenic highways. Clinton himself, who had grown up surrounded by a national park, was enraged. On a helicopter tour of the clear-cutting acreage near Hot Springs, he was told by a timber lobbyist that clear-cutting looked worse than it was. “Some of the wonderful things in this world don’t look good at first—like the birth of a baby,” the lobbyist said. “Yeah,” Clinton responded, “but at least babies are only born one at a time.”

  The struggle around the leveling of the forests of Arkansas was part of a larger and longer one in the economic development in the South. Clinton and Smith had studied the works of C. Vann Woodward and other historians who had chronicled the complicated and sometimes tragic effects of industrialization on an agrarian society. Starting in the 1870s, after the northern timber barons had virtually wiped out the hardwood stands of the Great Lakes region, they were lured south into states like Arkansas that were so eager for what they viewed as capitalist progress that they offered cheap land, cheap labor, and little regulation. The timber companies slashed through the state with no regard for the environment, leveling soft pine forests, setting up sawmills, then abandoning the sites as soon as the resources were exhausted. By 1920, the cut-and-run tactics of the timber companies had denuded Arkansas: more than 20 million acres had been cut, leaving less than 2 million acres of virgin forest. Although Arkansas in later years boasted of prudent forest management, the new clear-cutting practices raised fears of a return to the rapacious timber baron days of old. With these concerns in mind, Clinton established a timber management task force and assigned Smith to serve as staff director.

  The task force held thirteen hearings around the state in which they listened to public comments on the issue and examined the effects of clear-cutting from various scientific perspectives. To show the depth of his commitment, Clinton traveled to Nashville, a county seat deep in southwest Arkansas timber country, to chair the first public hearing. As the hearings progressed, the debate became polarized. Smith expressed outrage at the clear-cutting practices, charging that Weyerhaeuser had created the need for the task force because of its “public insensitivity and environmental disregard.” In private meetings of the Arkansas Forestry Association, other timber companies chastised Weyerhaeuser for embarrassing the entire industry by clear-cutting along roadways where the practice was so obvious to passers-by. The message was: If you’re going to clear-cut, at least do it where the public cannot see it so easily. But most of the industry’s wrath was directed at Smith and the governor’s office. John Ed Anthony, the Forestry Association president and the cousin of Democratic congressman Beryl Anthony, called the hearings “zoos” and accused Clinton of “releasing crazies” on the industry.

  Anthony began a letterwriting campaign in which he charged that Clinton was no friend of the forest industry and claimed that the governor’s aim was to impose state control of private lands and threaten the livelihood of forty thousand Arkansas voters who made their living in the timber and forest products business. By the end of the hearing process, Clinton was feeling intense political heat. “Every log driver, every sawmill hand, every mill worker was mad at Clinton,” Anthony recalled, and sharing that anger were state legislators from the timber counties who were hearing from the large companies as well as the 240,000 land owners who held timber rights on their property. Clinton arranged a meeting in Pine Bluff with Anthony and the executive committee of the Forestry Association. Without telling Smith, he brought along a draft copy of the task force report, which was critical of the industry and argued that the governor could ban clear-cutting by executive fiat.

  Clinton complained to the timber executives that he was being lied about. They were exaggerating his position, he said. He had not made any decisions on the issue and should not be held responsible for speculation in the press or by staff members on what he would do. “Every time I go south of Pine Bluff I run into a buzzsaw of criticism,” he said, according to Anthony. “I don’t think it’s fair and I want it stopped.” When he returned to Little Rock, Clinton ordered several changes, softening the criticisms of the timber industry and removing the threat of mandatory state action against clear-cutters, calling instead for voluntary changes in industry practices. It was also around that time that he appointed a new state forestry commissioner recommended by the timber lobby. Smith responded by submitting his resignation from the task force. He tried to resign from Clinton’s staff altogether, realizing that his longtime friend now considered him a political liability and that he was “not going to be made a knight of the realm.” Rudy Moore persuaded him to stay on for several more months, but his role and enthusiasm were greatly diminished, and Smith eventually left Little Rock to join another departed member of the governor’s staff in the operation of a small bank in Madison County in the hills of northwest Arkansas.

  Smith had mostly loved working for Clinton. And yet, in the end, Clinton turned from him when his political survival was endangered. “Bill Clinton pulled the rug out from under Steve Smith,” said Rudy Moore. “Steve thought that he was doing exactly what Bill Clinton wanted. Be a lightning rod. He was willing to accept that role. But Bill then backed away. He felt Steve had cost him politically. That’s when Steve decided to hang it up. He felt he had had enough of doing what he was supposed to do and get chewed on.”

  The larger lesson involved fundamentally different perceptions of how politics worked. Smith believed in the straight dialectic. “You win, you do what you can for your side, you screw the opposition. Then if the other side wins, you take what’s coming.” Whereas Clinton’s philosophy, as Smith determined it, was “that you can reach a satisfactory compromise of polar positions that is superior to either side. I see that as more often pissing off both sides.”

  Clinton’s conciliatory efforts in the timber controversy were of little avail. In the end, he did end up “pissing off both sides.” It was a case where he seemed to have difficulty appreciating who would be in his corner when he needed them. The industry would work hard to defeat him in the next election and maintained a distrustful relationship with him in later years, even though, as Anthony later boasted, “Bill never really bothered us again.”

  IN his formative years, Clinton was rarely around anyone who thought that getting rich was an important goal. Eldridge Cassidy, his beloved pappaw, the town iceman and grocer from Hope, was a generous soul who had little money and would just as soon give away
what he had. His mother Virginia wanted only enough to free herself from the chains of an abusive marriage and to place two-dollar bets at the racetrack. Although romanticized accounts of his childhood in Hope and Hot Springs would sometimes make it seem that Bill Clinton rose from poverty, his family was middle class and comfortable by rural Arkansas standards. As a teenager he played golf at a country club and swam at the country club pool and drove his own car. He was never poor enough to be consumed by envy for the wealthy boys and girls around him. If he felt any impulse to prevail over the social elite, he saw the political realm, not the business world, as his arena.

  From his high school years through his rise to the governorship, Clinton had steered clear of jobs in private industry and never held a post that paid more than $35,000 a year. He always worked but seemed to have little money. Travel aides remember how he would bum quarters from them on the road to buy soft drinks or a newspaper. Though he wanted to look sharp enough to impress women, he seldom took the trouble to buy new clothes and was known for wearing pants that were an inch too short and an inch too tight. When his brother won a magazine subscription contest in junior high, Clinton boasted only half-jokingly that at least someone in the family had practical abilities. He often told friends that he only wanted enough money in life to buy books, see the world, go to movies, and go out to eat. To be sure, he was usually the last one at the table to pick up a check. Rudy Moore often told the story of accompanying Clinton to the Democratic National Committee mini-convention in Memphis in 1978. Clinton, in his usual position at the center of a conversational huddle in a restaurant lounge, ended up getting the tab. Looking at the ninety-dollar check for a group of eight or ten, he smiled and said, “Gol, this ain’t so bad!”