First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Finally the conversation moved on to Rodham. What did she think? “You know,” she said, “I’m beginning to think there must be more to life than this greasy pole, this rat race.” She was talking about the greasy pole of politics and the rat race over money. And she added: “I’m thinking about getting back into religion.” The other women were stunned. They were utterly political creatures who had no context in which to place her remarks. “If she had said, ‘I think I’m going to be a Moonie,’” Merck said later, “she could not have appalled her audience more.”

  CHELSEA Victoria Clinton was born on February 27, 1980, seventeen days early. Clinton had been home from a trip to Washington less than fifteen minutes when Hillary went into labor. He had studied the Lamaze method and planned to be in the delivery room, but the birth was difficult and required a Caesarian section. When a nurse finally handed his infant daughter to him, he would not let go of her. “He walked all over the area … holding the baby in his arms,” a hospital official reported. As he looked at his daughter, he realized that he was experiencing something that his own father had never been able to do. “Well,” Clinton later recalled saying to himself, “here’s another milestone he didn’t reach.” The date was reminder enough. February 27 was the date that the family honored as the birthday of W.J. Blythe.

  Not long after mother and daughter returned home from the hospital, Carolyn Yeldell Staley, Clinton’s old high school friend, an opera singer who had moved back to Little Rock with her family to work on the state arts council, wrote a song about Chelsea. She sang it in the Governor’s Mansion, accompanying herself on the piano. It was a sentimental ballad written from the perspective of humble parents in awe of their creation. One stanza included the lines, “We may not be worthy, but we’ll try to be wise.” After listening to the song, Rodham approached Staley and said rather coldly, “That’s a nice song, Carolyn. But who’s not worthy? You and your tape recorder?”

  THE birth of Chelsea might have been the last good thing to happen to Clinton in 1980. On the American public stage, this was another year of confusion and disillusionment not unlike 1968, except this time along with tragedies and crises there were moments of incompetence and rotten luck piling up in rapid succession. Jimmy Carter went into that final year of his first term with the lowest ratings of any president in modern times, viewed by the liberal wing of his own party as too moderate and tight-fisted on domestic policy and by the larger public as weak and indecisive in foreign affairs. When he attempted to take strong action to counter the latter image, it seemed to compound the problem. When the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, he imposed a grain embargo on the Soviet Union and ordered a boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow, actions which angered midwestern wheat farmers and demoralized the public. When the Iranians would not respond to diplomatic efforts to free dozens of Americans held hostage in Tehran, he ordered a rescue mission that aborted when a U.S. Navy helicopter crashed in the Iranian desert, killing eight servicemen. One unpredictable event after another left Carter and the nation reeling. There were race riots in Miami. Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington State. More than one hundred thousand Cuban refugees, encouraged to leave by Fidel Castro, landed on the beaches of Florida in what was known as the Mariel boatlift.

  The state of Arkansas in 1980 was a microcosm of national unease and disarray. Truckers were striking, Ku Klux Klansmen were on the march, tornadoes ripped through the countryside. The economy was turning downward, forcing state revenues below the overoptimistic estimates and costing public school teachers the raises they expected. Although Clinton’s poll ratings remained higher than Carter’s that spring, he sensed that he was in trouble. When Frank White, a beefy, jovial savings and loan executive and former economic development official in the Pryor administration, switched parties and announced that he would challenge Clinton as a Republican in the fall election, Clinton told Rodham that White would start the race with 45 percent of the vote. The young governor feared that he had already angered at least that many people during his first year in office.

  A seconding motion came sooner than expected, in the Democratic primary in late May, when Monroe Schwarzlose, the seventy-seven-year-old turkey farmer, drew 31 percent of the vote. The old farmer’s showing was a stunning expression of no confidence in Clinton, since Schwarzlose was the ultimate fringe candidate, who had carried only I percent in the same primary in 1978. It was also a signal to Clinton from the timber industry, which was still raging over the clear-cutting controversy. Schwarzlose fared best in south Arkansas timber counties, where he received behind-the-scenes encouragement from John Ed Anthony.

  A few days later, on June 1, a bad situation deteriorated. Suddenly, perhaps inevitably, the troubles of Governor Clinton and President Carter converged in northwest Arkansas, when several hundred Cuban refugees who had come to the United States in the Mariel boatlift rioted and broke out of their resettlement camp at Fort Chaffee. Clinton would be given high marks for his performance under pressure in dealing with the Cuban refugee crisis, but his close friendship with Carter, which became strained in private but did not break in public, was held against him by Arkansas voters. It was also used to great advantage by Republican challenger Frank White and his handlers, who replayed footage of the Fort Chaffee riot to associate Clinton with images of disorder and bad times.

  The buildup of tension at Fort Chaffee began in mid-May with the arrival of the first Cubans. Although the sprawling military base had been used as a resettlement center for Vietnamese refugees earlier in the decade with little controversy, nearby residents were alarmed this time by reports that the Cuban contingent included criminals and mental patients. Most of the eighteen thousand refugees sent to Arkansas waited patiently to get processed. But a number of rebellious young men grew more agitated day by day at their confinement. Several hundred of them broke out of the camp on May 26 and created a minor disturbance in a nearby hamlet. Clinton had urged federal officials to tighten security after that to prevent a more serious confrontation with posses of shotgun-toting citizens in towns near the fort. If the federal authorities did not secure the camp within seventy-two hours, Clinton said, he would take action to secure it himself.

  Clinton took precautionary steps in that direction. He activated a few dozen National Guardsmen and authorized state police to send troops to the Fort Smith area from all eight sectors of the state. But he was surprised and embarrassed by a second round of disturbances, believing wrongly that the Carter administration by then had resolved a dispute among federal officials over control of the refugees. White House aide Eugene Eidenberg had insisted in conversations with Clinton that the post commander, Brigadier General James (Bulldog) Drummond, had been granted the authority to contain the Cubans inside their relocation camp. Drummond maintained that he had no such authority. On the morning of June 1, after staging a sit-in at the main gate, several hundred Cubans bolted past the military guards, who did nothing to stop them, and marched onto a nearby-highway chanting “Libertad! Libertad!” They were met by a state police squad and retreated to the fort. But late that afternoon, they congregated at the main gate again, this time more than a thousand strong, and again met no resistance from the military guards as they ran out the gate and down the highway, carrying sticks and bottles. The state police had formed a protective line at the edge of the town of Barling. When the Cubans reached them, there was a brief confrontation in which sixty-seven people were injured, including several officers, but mostly Cubans, some of whom had their heads cracked open.

  Clinton and James H. Jones, the adjutant general of the Arkansas National Guard, and Jones’s chief of staff, James A. Ryan, flew by helicopter from Little Rock to Fort Chaffee soon after they heard about the riot. Their first meeting was with General Drummond. Ryan had never seen the young governor in a tense situation of that sort before and thought “he asked some very intelligent questions, questions that were relevant.” Jack Moseley, editor of the Southwest Times Record in Fort Smith, was eavesdropp
ing outside the open door. He heard “a lot of shouting and loud voices” and Drummond saying that it was not the Army’s fault because it was restricted by law from intervening. A voice that Moseley identified as Clinton’s responded by saying, “Well shit, General, who left the wirecutters in the stockade if none of this was the military’s fault?”

  After the meeting with Drummond, Clinton activated two National Guard battalions and an infantry company and had them stationed outside the gates. He then had his staff arrange a meeting with community leaders and concerned residents, first in Barling, then in Jenny Lind. The crowds were hostile at first. At Barling, one local official jumped up on his chair and shook his fist at the governor. At Jenny Lind, Clinton hopped up on the back of a pickup truck parked under a shade tree, surrounded by angry local men carrying shotguns. Moseley, who would endorse Frank White later that year in editorials that excoriated Clinton, nonetheless came away from the Fort Chaffee incident impressed by Clinton’s behavior under pressure: “I think he showed a tremendous amount of fortitude. He took charge. He accepted responsibility. He behaved in a responsible manner. He listened to what the military commander had to say and went toe to toe with the White House.” Eidenberg, the White House official in charge of the refugee situation, arrived at Fort Smith in the middle of the night and was met by Clinton, who “in no uncertain terms” made clear to him that “it was his judgment that the dispute over the law enforcement authority question had made possible an event that did not have to happen.”

  Eidenberg agreed. At a press conference held at two-thirty that morning, he pledged that no more Cubans would be sent to Arkansas.

  WITH more troops stationed outside the gates and the dispute over military authority resolved, there were no more refugee uprisings that summer. But the Fort Chaffee drama was only at intermission, soon to be resumed, and other troubles kept coming at Clinton nonstop. A sense of imminent disaster permeated the governor’s office. If a telephone rang after office hours, aides would joke, “Don’t answer it—they’ll probably want the National Guard!” The state broiled in a heatwave that took the lives of several older citizens, led to the suffocating deaths of thousands of poultry chicks, and made life generally miserable for an already grousing populace. Even more troublesome was the car tags issue, which would not go away. Every month, one-twelfth of the car owners in the state erupted in anger as they had their license tags renewed and were required to pay fees that had increased by as much as tenfold. Although the licenses still went for relatively modest sums, the tax became an easy and obvious target of public discontent—all of it directed not at the legislature but at Clinton.

  It reached the point where chief of staff Rudy Moore felt that they could not please anybody. He thought of it as a wave of hostility building, month after month. By July, Clinton realized that the wave might drown him. One day, after giving speeches in El Dorado and Texarkana, he returned to the office staggering from the negative reaction he was getting.

  “Rudy, they’re killing me out there!” he said to Moore. “They hate my guts!”

  “What are you talking about?” Moore asked.

  “The car tags,” said Clinton. “A man came up to me and said, ‘I’m havin’ a hard enough time makin’ a livin’, and you’re kickin’ me while I’m down.’ They’re killing me out there, Rudy.”

  On August 1, Clinton came to believe that his own president was among those killing him. Word came from the White House that all Cuban refugees still being housed at resettlement camps in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida would be transferred to a single consolidated camp at Fort Chaffee. Only two months earlier, Gene Eidenberg had visited Fort Chaffee and promised that no more Cubans would be sent there. Now, the White House officials had changed their minds. Travel aide Randy White was in the room at the Governor’s Mansion when Clinton got the news and remembers that his boss pounded his desk and launched into an obscenity-laced protest that, considering the circumstances, amounted to a rather normal reaction.

  “You’re fucking me!” White heard Clinton shout into the phone at a White House official. “How could you do this to me? I busted my ass for Carter. You guys are gonna get me beat. I’ve done everything I could for you guys. This is ridiculous! Carter’s too chickenshit about it to tell me directly!”

  Clinton nonetheless promised to keep the story quiet over the weekend until Eidenberg could travel to Arkansas to explain the situation directly to people in the communities near Fort Chaffee. Word leaked out later that day from Senator Pryor’s office. When the press asked Clinton if he could confirm Pryor’s claim, he acknowledged that he had known about the White House decision. He had agreed to Eidenberg’s request to keep quiet, he said, because he hoped to spend the weekend persuading administration officials to change their minds. The decision, Clinton told reporters, was the most politically damaging one Carter could make. Placing the final resettlement camp in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Florida would have been smarter, he argued, because Carter had a better chance of carrying Arkansas in the fall election than any of those states. Now, he shared Pryor’s assessment that Carter’s chances in Arkansas were shot.

  What more could Clinton do besides cuss out the White House in private and bemoan the political consequences in public? Many of his aides thought that he should “kick and fuss and holler and just tell Jimmy Carter no,” in Rudy Moore’s words. Clinton was not prepared to go that far. One reason was historical and emotional: he saw too many modern-day parallels to what he considered to be Arkansas’ day of infamy in 1957, when Governor Faubus evoked states’ rights to defy federal authorities seeking to desegregate Little Rock Central High School. If the people of Arkansas wanted a provincial demagogue, they would have to look elsewhere. There were many things Clinton would do to try to win an election, but that was not one of them.

  There was, to be sure, a broader political consideration as well. As unpopular as Carter might be in Arkansas, he was still president; he was still heavily favored to prevail over challenger Edward Kennedy and win renomination at the Democratic National Convention to be held in New York less than two weeks later. Clinton had signed up as a floor whip for Carter at the convention. He had been chosen to give a primetime convention speech as the spokesman for the Democratic governors, after being among those considered for an even more coveted assignment as the keynote speaker. He had strong connections to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, John C. White, the former Texas agriculture commissioner who had been one of Clinton’s patrons since the 1972 McGovern campaign. He was still enjoying insider status as Carter’s man in Arkansas, sought out for patronage decisions, consulted on domestic programs, invited to briefings on foreign affairs. A too-public break with Carter now might jeopardize what remained of their special relationship.

  That weekend Clinton traveled to Denver for the annual meeting of the National Governors Association, where most of the talk among the twenty-four Democratic governors in attendance was about maneuvering between Carter and Kennedy on convention rules and the party platform. Suppressing his sense of betrayal, Clinton worked to shore up support for the president among the other governors. On the afternoon of August 4, he talked on the telephone with Carter, who was at the White House. Gene Eidenberg, who was also at the governors’ conference, monitored the conversation. Clinton tried but failed to talk the president out of the Fort Chaffee decision, instead only gaining a promise that the state would play a central role in the development of a new security policy at the refugee camp. Although most people viewed the decision through a political lens, Carter insisted that politics had nothing to do with it. Fort Chaffee was chosen on its merits, as a warm-weather site that had the most suitable facilities. At a meeting at Fort Chaffee the next day, Eidenberg officially announced the consolidation plan and tried to explain that his earlier pledge not to send any more Cubans to Arkansas was rendered “inoperative” by circumstances which could not have been foreseen. “I understand,” Eidenberg said, “why that statement
made then and the decision made now, being announced now, is being viewed, let’s be frank with each other, as a lie, as a breaking of my word, and worse, a breaking of the word of the President of the United States.”

  CLINTON and Rodham had friends on both sides of the Carter and Kennedy fight. Some called it a struggle for the soul of the Democratic party, but it was fought as much out of weariness and confusion as out of passion. Kennedy supporters thought Carter was foundering because he had turned away from fundamental liberal doctrine and had gotten lost in compromise and vacillation. Carterites believed that Kennedy was waging a futile symbolic struggle for a governing philosophy from which the American public had long since turned away.

  Although Rodham was considered the more liberal member of the partnership, she had no trouble choosing sides in this dispute. On a trip to San Francisco, she stayed at the home of Fred Altshuler, her friend from the House impeachment inquiry staff, who held a dinner party in her honor. The Kennedy versus Carter battle dominated the conversation. Altshuler was highly critical of Carter and made an impassioned case for Kennedy. Rodham derided him, defending, it seemed, not only the president but her husband by inference. “She said she was talking about practical politics and I was talking about impractical politics,” Altshuler recalled. “She was saying, ‘You have to look at who can get elected and what he can accomplish.’ She was definitely in a minority. There were not any other Carter supporters at the dinner. But she held her position.”

  Clinton’s friends in the Kennedy camp had no better luck. Carl Wagner, a Kennedy aide who had worked with Clinton at Project Pursestrings and served as George McGovern’s coordinator in Michigan when Clinton was in Texas, talked with Clinton often that summer. He found Clinton’s support of Carter unshakable, even after the Cuban refugee fiasco. Wagner understood. All his friends were seeing their way through that race on their own terms. As a southern governor seeking reelection, an association with Teddy Kennedy would have done Clinton no good.