First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  One evening later that year, when Clinton took his traveling show up to Bentonville in northwest Arkansas, Rudy Moore felt as though it was his hand and those of other former assistants that Clinton’s meat cleaver was cutting off. Moore had gone to a reception for Clinton at a private home. During a question and answer period, a local banker got up and started criticizing Steve Smith and other members of Clinton’s first-term staff. It did not surprise Moore that Clinton chose not to defend Smith. But Moore was disappointed to hear Clinton give a long answer about the mistakes of his first term in which it seemed that he placed most of the blame on the staff. Moore left the reception feeling that “the rug had been pulled out from under” him. He had done nothing but work hard and be loyal, he thought to himself. He had given up his life in Springdale for a few years to devote himself to Clinton, and now “all of a sudden I’m getting the feeling that for his own well-being the staff becomes expendable at this point.”

  Moore later wrote Clinton a letter questioning whether he had sacrificed his old staff to the political gods in his bid for redemption. In his reply, Clinton argued, “Whatever you may think, I consistently defended you and your role on my staff in private meetings all over the state…. I always acknowledged that we had some serious staff problems but I tried to take full responsibility for them.”

  He had been misinterpreted, Clinton claimed.

  Late that summer, national political columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover wrote in their column that Clinton had hired Betsey Wright to help him lay the groundwork for his 1982 campaign for governor. Wrong, Clinton responded, when local reporters asked him about the column. His actions were being misinterpreted. Germond and Witcover had “made too many assumptions.” Although Wright was working for him at a desk out-side his law office, “her job was not politically related.” She was just helping him establish a computer filing system for his gubernatorial papers. “There is no campaign,” he said.

  FOR a few days each month, Dick Morris had been commuting to Little Rock from New York to help plot Clinton’s comeback. It did not start out as a pleasant task. He felt some competition with Betsey Wright, who was there doing the same thing. On first sight, they hated each other. Wright viewed Morris as a slick, negative eastern sharpie who was “trying to take this moral man and corrupt him in the evil ways of politics.” Morris viewed Wright as a “rigid left-wing ideologue who was so obsessively opposed to modern political campaigning that she would lead him back into the Stone Age politically.” Each saw the other as a mortal threat. But the animosity dissipated, until finally Wright and Morris found themselves agreeing on almost every political move. They became allies in the resurrection of Bill Clinton. Wright would compliment Morris by calling him “one of the smartest little sons of bitches” she had ever met. “Mean. But God was he good.”

  Early in the fall of 1981, Morris polled Arkansas voters to gauge their feelings about Clinton. He feared that the public regarded Clinton as an alien figure, trained at Yale and Oxford, who had patronized them and had no sense of their state, and that they would feel no remorse about having got rid of him. But the poll results showed that the voters had a paternal attitude toward Clinton. Frank White had not won the election so much as Clinton had lost it. Morris and Wright began to construct a family parable out of the poll results. The citizens of Arkansas viewed Clinton as a prodigal son who had grown too big for his britches, who had thought that he knew everything and had tried to tell the other family members what was best for them rather than listening to their suggestions. They had voted against him to teach him a lesson, to give him a public spanking, but they had not necessarily intended for him to lose. The parable allowed for forgiveness. It meant, Wright concluded, that “a comeback was doable.”

  But first Clinton had to apologize. Morris conceived the notion of a public mea culpa, a television advertisement in which Clinton announced his comeback bid by saying he was sorry. In discussing it with Wright, Clinton, and Rodham, Morris, who was Jewish, put it in terms of the theological metaphor of Christian forgiveness. “You have to recognize your sins, confess to them, and promise to sin no more and then sin no more,” Morris said. “And in the act of contrition, you have to be humble. You can’t be self-justified. You have to say, ‘I’m very sorry, ashamed, I know I did wrong and I’ll never do it again.ߣ” Rodham and Wright immediately took to the idea. Clinton had somewhat of a hard time fully accepting it. He felt humbled, certainly, and stupid for losing to Frank White, but the part he could not get past was being restrained from trying to explain and justify what he had done. On one level, he would say, “I screwed up.” But on another level he would ask, “Which of the things that I did would I do differently? Would I not fulfill my campaign promise to build better roads?” He could justify every specific action he had taken.

  It was bigger than specifics, Morris insisted. It was his attitude, his approach to governing. The voters thought he was patronizing. He had to learn how to sail into the wind, Morris said. “You don’t abandon where you want to go, but you have to tack to get there. You have to one minute go right for the objective, and then at some point when you find the boat is about to tip over, you steer in another direction until the boat regains stability, then once more head toward the objective. You approach it in a series of triangular moves, instead of head-on.” The objective here was to get back in office. The triangular move was to apologize in a paid public television advertisement.

  Clinton agreed to go ahead with the mea culpa, but continued to argue with Morris about the wording. The language was too apologetic, he complained.

  “Well,” Morris responded, according to his later recollection, “you can’t say, ‘So I robbed the store but I needed the money badly because my sister is starving.’ That’s a very nice justification for robbing the store, but it implies that you don’t think it was all wrong to rob the store.”

  “But I don’t!” Clinton said.

  “But you do!” Morris said.

  At one point, the two men spent several hours arguing over whether the word “apology” should be in the ad. They finally agreed to the language for two spots, one a general apology for mistakes including the car tags increase, and another addressing his decision during the final days of his term to pardon scores of violent criminals whose release had been recommended by the state parole board. They went to New York, to the West 57th Street studios of media consultant Tony Schwartz, for the filming. Before the cameras went on, Clinton revealed to Morris that he had fiddled with the words one last time. Morris was in shock. “I’m not gonna tell you what I did—I just want you to see it,” Clinton said.

  In the end, Clinton managed to say he that he was sorry without saying he was sorry. He did it by using down-home Arkansas language. Morris was elated by the change. When he was growing up, Clinton said, his daddy never had to whip him twice for the same thing. If the voters gave him another chance, he said, he would never make the same mistakes again. He had learned that he could not lead without listening.

  The ads began running on three Little Rock television stations on February 8, 1982. Clinton’s face filled the screen, barely leaving room for his name and the tag line identifying the commercial as paid for by the Clinton for Governor Committee. What the public saw was that Clinton was chastened. Political observers in Little Rock had never seen anything like it—someone announcing for governor via a thirty-second commercial, and doing so with an apology. But the strategy was apparent: By admitting his mistakes and seeking absolution before the first tough question of the race could be asked, Clinton was able to say that criticisms of his previous actions were irrelevant.

  ANOTHER problem needed fixing as the comeback campaign began, this one involving Hillary Rodham and her name. Since his first race for governor in 1978, Clinton’s opponents had tried to make something out of that. It was very un-Arkansan, they would imply, marking Rodham as an outsider who stubbornly resisted the traditional mores of her adopted state. This sentiment was s
hared by many of Clinton’s friends, including his own mother. During the 1980 campaign, one powerful member of the Arkansas House offered the opinion to Representative Ray Smith, Jr., of Hot Springs that “Hillary’s gonna have to change her name, and shave her legs.” Rodham had ignored the issue in the past, but now, as she saw her and her husband’s political ambitions on the line, she reconsidered.

  Her change, in typical Rodham fashion, was more intellectual than emotional. When Carolyn Staley dropped by the Midland Avenue house the morning after a party in Little Rock, Rodham asked her a question that Staley had never heard from her before: “What were people wearing?” It was clear to Staley that Rodham was “making the transformation from studied feminist. She started to key in on the fact that the name was political, that what she wore was political.” Years later, when asked about the name change, Clinton recalled a conversation he had with his wife in which she approached him and said, “We’ve got to talk about this name deal.” As Clinton remembered it, Rodham told him that she did not want him to lose the election because of her last name. Clinton said he protested. Then, by his account, she placed the decision in the most pragmatic political terms: “We shouldn’t run the risk. What if it’s one percent of the vote? What if it’s two percent?”

  If Clinton protested, it was not very strenuously. In conversations when his wife was not around, he often joked about their different names in a way that made it clear he thought it would be easier if she became Hillary Clinton. Once, while eating Mexican food with some old friends from the McGovern campaign during a visit to Austin, Clinton noted that he and his wife disagreed on an issue and then added, “Hell, I can’t even get her to use my last name!”

  All that changed on February 27, 1982, the day of Clinton’s formal announcement, when Hillary referred to herself as “Mrs. Bill Clinton.” Was it really a change, and was it something that she wanted to do? Her answers that day left room for confusion. “I don’t have to change my name,” she said. “I’ve been Mrs. Bill Clinton. I kept the professional name Hillary Rodham in my law practice, but now I’m going to be taking a leave of absence from the law firm to campaign full-time for Bill and I’ll be Mrs. Bill Clinton. I suspect people will be getting tired of hearing from Mrs. Bill Clinton.” But when asked whether she had legally changed her name and was now registered to vote as Hillary Clinton, she said, “No.” The press accounts of that exchange made it clear that she still had some convincing to do.

  The Times-News of McGehee put it this way: “‘No,’ came the ice cold answer from Arkansas’ former first lady.”

  THE public reaction to Clinton’s mea culpa ad was swift and sure. People hated it. In a three-way race in the Democratic primary for governor against Jim Guy Tucker and Joe Purcell, Clinton fell from the top spot, from holding about 43 percent of the vote, down to the mid-20s. Voters who said they held a favorable view of Clinton dropped. The number who held an unfavorable view doubled. Tucker, the politician he had conspired to defeat in the 1978 Senate race against David Pryor, was now ahead of him. And all because of a self-inflicted wound. Morris’s polls showed that the mea culpa caused the precipitous decline in Clinton’s ratings, reminding voters of the reasons they turned away from him in the first place. The consultant flew out to Arkansas to deliver the grim news, and met Clinton and Rodham in a small town where Clinton was giving a speech. He tried to put the best spin on the poll results. The apology was like a smallpox vaccination, he said. You get a little sick, but then you are immune. He said it, Morris recalled later, with “great bravado and self-confidence.” But he did not mean it. He thought he had destroyed his client.

  The immunization theory was quickly tested. It was a bitter, unenlightening primary, with most of the enmity flowing between Tucker and Clinton, who were both in desperate, anything-goes moods, fighting for political survival. They attacked each other daily, each trying to prove that he was tougher and more conservative. Tucker attacked Clinton for commuting or cutting the sentences of thirty-eight convicted murderers during the final weeks of his first term. Clinton attacked Tucker’s poor attendance record in Congress and portrayed Tucker as a tool of labor and the special interests and as a bleeding heart on welfare issues. He criticized Tucker for supporting liberal food stamp standards. It was left to the Arkansas Gazette to point out that Tucker had merely voted against an amendment that would have eliminated food stamps for striking workers. In an editorial entitled “Bill Clinton on the Low Road,” the Gazette concluded of his food stamp attack: “It is an uncharacteristic place for Bill Clinton to take his stand, and in the sanctity of his own thoughts he must be ashamed.”

  Shame was not foremost on Clinton’s mind that year. His main concern was to stay alive. The intensity of his mood was revealed in April when he got into a dispute with the Arkansas Education Association (AEA). At a meeting with a screening committee for the teachers’ union, Clinton was asked what kind of relationship he would maintain with the AEA if they did not endorse him. According to Larry Russell, a teacher at Lake Hamilton High who was chairman of the committee, Clinton “said he would tear our heads off and beat our brains out if we endorsed another candidate.” Russell and Lyle French, the president of the union, took Clinton’s statement to mean that he might hold a grudge against them.

  “Nothing could be further from the truth and I resent this!” Clinton bellowed during a rally in Hot Springs a few days later. In Clinton’s version of the event, when the screening committee asked him how he would respond if he failed to get their endorsement, “I told them this is a political race and they would be trying to end my political career and that I would beat their brains out.” But, Clinton said, he left no implication that he would hold it against them. The teachers endorsed Tucker.

  But Clinton’s negative approach was working. The next round of internal polls found that all of Clinton’s negative attacks on Tucker scored, driving his poll ratings down fifteen points, while none of Tucker’s attacks hurt Clinton. It seemed that Clinton had indeed been immunized. “The polls showed a tremendous backlash of sympathy for Clinton because he had already apologized,” Morris recalled. “People said, ‘What’s Tucker dumping on him for? He already apologized. It’s a rare man who can admit his mistakes.’ The immunity was so palpably there that it was a tremendously useful thing to have gone through.” Clinton and Rodham filed it away in their briefcase of effective political tactics, to be pulled out now and again when Clinton got caught in uncomfortable situations. The calculated act of contrition: when in trouble, go directly to the people and confess on your own terms.

  As often happens when two candidates bury each other in mud during a three-way primary, the voters became interested in the third candidate. Joe Purcell, a soft-spoken former lieutenant governor, made it into a runoff with Clinton, while Tucker was eliminated. Clinton and his strategists would have preferred to have faced Tucker again. “Tucker had a record we could run against,” Betsey Wright said later. “Joe Purcell was a lovable old slipper. We didn’t know what to do with him.” Purcell was in the Judge Holt mold, a dignified man who refused to make personal attacks against his opponents. Clinton could not claim that someone was going at him with a hammer, but he was forced to use the meat cleaver anyway. Morris’s first poll during the two-week runoff showed Purcell ahead, with most of the Tucker vote going to him. They put up one negative ad and spread the word that Republicans were interfering in the runoff on Purcell’s behalf. Luckily for Clinton, runoffs, with traditionally low voter turnouts, depend largely on campaign organizations, and Purcell did not have one. The results on June 8 gave Clinton 54 percent of the vote. “We want Frank! We want Frank!” Clinton’s supporters shouted that night. They got Frank. The rematch with Governor White was at hand.

  THE general election of 1982 was almost completely devoid of the internal bickering of many other Clinton campaigns. It combined the optimism and freshness of his 1974 congressional campaign with the technical skill of his later efforts. With Hillary, Betsey Wright,
and Dick Morris at the head of the campaign organization, there were enough decisive people to offset Clinton’s indecisiveness, which was less noticeable than usual anyway because of the urgency of his cause. He had a clear mission: redemption.

  “Hell, he knew what was at stake,” Woody Bassett, who organized Washington County for him, later recalled. “He knew that if he lost, it was the end for him in elected politics.”

  His supporters had various missions of their own. Some hated Frank White. Some thought Clinton deserved another chance and felt guilty that they had not worked harder for him in 1980. Some were embarrassed that the state had regained a backwater image with the enactment of fundamentalist legislation requiring public schools to teach creationism along with evolution. Young black professionals who moved back to the state at the start of the 1980s saw Clinton as the conduit for their rise. The vibrancy of a political campaign can be measured by the ratio of volunteers to paid staffers. In 1980, Clinton struggled to find volunteers. This time, the headquarters overflowed with volunteers and there were only a handful of paid staff members. Betsey Wright called it a crusade—her first, and her best—in Arkansas. If the volunteers were the soul of the campaign, the computer system was its brain. The dedicated computer room in the campaign headquarters near the Capitol ran around the clock, churning out Glad-to-Meet-You letters, fund-raising solicitations, special letters for black supporters, for first-time supporters, for teachers, for the elderly. Letters to friends of Bill went out in an endless stream. No other politician in Arkansas had anything comparable. The computer became the mechanical extension of Clinton’s tireless personality. What else. What else. What else.