First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  In the aftermath of Mondale’s defeat, Clinton began to place his programs into a broader philosophy of opportunity and responsibility, which he saw as a theme that could lead to change without alienating the middle class. His education reforms in Arkansas set the model: the opportunity was for teachers to get more pay and more flexibility, the opportunity was for students to get more course offerings and smaller class sizes, and the responsibility was for both teachers and students to document their skills through standardized competence tests. During the mid-1980s, as he took an increasingly active role in the National Governors Association, he pushed that theme and expanded its scope to include other issues such as welfare, where workfare-style proposals Clinton helped design and push offered opportunity for work, education, and child care, but linked them to the responsibility of welfare recipients to work their way off the rolls and find jobs. In Arkansas, he offered major industries the opportunity to expand through major tax breaks, with the responsibility of staying in the state and expanding their workforces. He was merging ends and means, strategy and philosophy. And as he followed that course, his critics argued that his efforts to develop win-win situations made him so malleable that his word was unreliable. Of his opportunity-responsibility theme, some complained that more of the responsibility seemed to be placed on the less powerful and more of the opportunity seemed to be going to those who already had ample clout and, not incidentally, the wealth that Clinton needed to fund his political rise.

  The essential question of his permanent campaign became whether his will to survive would overwhelm his convictions.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  RELATIONSHIPS

  FOR MORE THAN a decade, since his return home from his long odyssey through Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale, Clinton had been preoccupied with the task of becoming. Only rarely was he jolted into periods of introspection during which he would consider why he was what he was. It had happened when his daughter was born, and again when he was defeated for governor. Now that question engulfed him once again. This time it began when a young man named Rodney Myers approached Arkansas State Police narcotics investigator Robert Gibbs and Hot Springs detective Travis Bunn in the spring of 1984 and told them that Roger Cassidy Clinton, the governor’s younger brother, was a cocaine dealer. The investigators heard Myers’s story, which meshed with other information they had been gathering during a state-federal narcotics probe of cocaine use in Arkansas. They took him to see Sergeant Larry Gleghorn, Gibbs’s supervisor at the criminal division, who set in motion a sting operation in which they would wire Myers with a hidden tape recorder and place a video camera in his apartment to record Roger Clinton selling cocaine.

  The awkwardness in having the Arkansas State Police investigate the brother of the Arkansas governor was compounded by the fact that both Gibbs and Gleghorn knew the Clintons personally. Before transferring to the criminal division, they had been assigned to the state police security detail at the executive mansion, serving as bodyguards, chauffeurs, and at times valets for the governor and his family. Gleghorn had been friendly with the extended Clinton clan, including Roger and his mother Virginia, who was now married to her fourth husband, Richard Kelley, a food broker. During Gleghorn’s two-year stint at the mansion, Roger had been a frequent visitor and an occasional problem. The governor’s younger brother was a good-times fellow, gold-chained and open-collared, and though he detested the memory of his father and namesake, who died when he was eleven, he seemed to have taken on a measure of the old man’s personality: the gregarious and unreliable “dude,” surviving on guile and charm. He had partied and performed with his rock band at after-hours clubs in Little Rock that stayed open until dawn. More than once, according to Gleghorn, Governor Clinton had asked a member of the security detail “to kind of go and keep an eye on that situation.” Now the eye was a surveillance camera.

  One day soon after the investigation began, a state police official alerted Clinton’s law enforcement aide, who told chief of staff Betsey Wright. Wright called the Rose Law Firm in search of Hillary, who had rejoined the firm after her service on the education task force, and found her eating lunch with friends at a restaurant on Kavanaugh Street. Wright and Hillary drove to the mansion and told the governor. According to Clinton’s later recollections, he was also informed of the investigation separately by State Police Colonel Tommy Goodwin. It was not, in any case, the most closely held secret. Nor was it normal procedure to advise the brother of a drug suspect that a sting operation was under way. Although Clinton had no authority over the matter, he wrote a note to Colonel Goodwin stating that he would not interfere in the investigation and that he expected it to be handled in routine fashion.

  Clinton’s private reaction to the news was a mixture of guilt and dread. When he and Roger had lived in the same home on Scully Street, and even during the early years at Georgetown, he had included his little brother in many of his activities and had written and talked about him with parental love and concern. But then he “got so wrapped up in” his career, Clinton said later, that he paid less attention to his brother. Did the news that Roger was a cocaine dealer take him by surprise? Clinton said later that it did, and that he felt guilty about not being more involved during those years as Roger dropped out of college three times and bounced around with rock bands. But the fact that, even before the drug investigation began, Clinton occasionally had asked members of his security detail to watch out for Roger indicates that he had some suspicions. The heads-up from the state police, according to Betsey Wright, was “not the first time the possibility of his brother using cocaine had ever crossed his mind, yet it took him by surprise. Suspecting is not mutually exclusive from being taken by surprise. You hope against hope.”

  Part of Clinton’s dread came from the realization that he had to keep quiet about what he had learned. The painful prospect of allowing his brother to be stung, arrested, and sentenced to prison was balanced against the politically damaging repercussions of interfering in an official investigation. The surveillance dragged on for weeks. With Officer Gibbs hiding under a blanket in the back seat of the car, informant Myers drove out to Roger’s apartment and emerged with cocaine and a secret tape-recording of the transaction. Four more deals were made and recorded, as investigators gathered evidence on Roger and a cocaine scene that involved a Colombian national supplier operating between Arkansas and New York and a circle of cocaine users in Hot Springs and Little Rock that included wealthy young lawyers and bond brokers. Roger was heard boasting about how untouchable he was, how nobody would mess with the brother of the governor.

  During that period, Clinton talked to both Roger and his mother several times without mentioning the investigation. Alone with Hillary or Betsey Wright, he would ask, “Do you think they are ever going to finish this?” Finally, the investigators confronted Roger and told him they were charging him with distribution of cocaine. According to Gibbs, Roger tried to deny that he had done anything wrong until he was made aware of the recordings and videotapes. Bill Clinton’s sadness at the fall of his brother was tempered by relief that the period of uncertainty was over. He held a press conference in Little Rock that afternoon and then drove down to Hot Springs for a family meeting with his mother and Roger. It was an emotional scene, as later described by Virginia, who said that Roger had arrived in tears, threatening to kill himself because of the embarrassment and pain he was bringing to his devoted mother and famous brother. “I caused it! I can end it!” he sobbed. The suicide talk enraged Bill, who shouted, “How dare you think that way!”, leaped up from his chair, and started shaking Roger furiously.

  For Clinton, a period of intense introspection began soon after his brother’s arrest, when Roger entered therapy for his drug addiction. The counselor, Karen Ballard, requested that Bill and Virginia join the sessions. For the first time, the mother and two sons talked openly about alcoholism and the effects it had had on their family. It came out that Virginia had developed a tendency to avoid unpleasan
t truths and block out difficult parts of her life. Just as she had once been reluctant to acknowledge that her angry and skeptical mother might have been right about the failings of Roger the husband, it was hard for her to accept now that Roger the son had a chemical addiction of his own. Virginia had faced so many obstacles in her life that she had taught herself to create her own version of reality and function within it, allowing her to maintain her optimism and to persevere. Bill discovered that he had the same characteristics, including the denial mechanism, he told friends. It had always been easier for him to discuss the premature death of his biological father, and how that pushed him to achieve at an early age, than to consider how he was shaped by his stepfather’s alcoholism, which he had never mentioned to most of his closest friends. In the sessions with his brother and mother, Clinton said later, “We learned a lot about how you do a lot of damage to yourself if you’re living with an alcoholic and you just sort of deny that behavior and deflect it all. You pay a big price for that.”

  For several weeks, Clinton delved into the literature of alcoholism and co-dependence, the emerging fashionable theory, which placed addiction in the realm of family relationships. According to Betsey Wright, Clinton often came back to the office talking about the latest book he had read and relating it to his own experience. It was the first time she had heard him talk about alcoholism in his home, and how it had made him so averse to conflict. “He did a lot of introspection that I had never seen him do like that before,” Wright recalled. “He got a much better understanding of why he did things the way he did. It was in the context of learning about how that comes out of an alcoholic home. Most notable was why he was always trying to please people. He was fascinated by it, and it rang so true that it was kind of like he was being introduced to something that he wished he had known a long time ago.” This did not mean that Clinton changed his behavior, Wright thought, but simply that he could “see what he was doing far better.”

  In a discussion with Carolyn Yeldell Staley, Clinton indicated that he was struggling with his self-awareness. “I think we’re all addicted to something,” Clinton told her, according to Staley’s recollections. “Some people are addicted to drugs. Some to power. Some to food. Some to sex. We’re all addicted to something.” It seemed to Staley that Clinton was “coming to grips with the fact that he had places of real weakness. He was trying to sort all of that out in his life.”

  Clinton, Virginia, and Hillary Clinton all sat in the federal courtroom on the day in January 1985 when Roger was sentenced to a two-year prison term at the federal correctional institution in Fort Worth, Texas. As part of his plea, Roger agreed to testify, with immunity, for the government in several other cocaine cases. One resulted in the conviction of his childhood friend, Sam Anderson, Jr., a limousine-riding Hot Springs attorney. Another led to a six-month prison term for investment banker Dan R. Lasater, a flashy young financier, racehorse owner, and recreational cocaine user who set out lines of the white powder at his lavish parties.

  The connections between Lasater and the Clintons throughout the decade raised questions about the propriety of the relationship. Roger, who had been one of Lasater’s cocaine suppliers, had worked briefly for him at one of his horse farms and as his driver, and had borrowed $8,000 from him to pay off a drug debt. At the same time, Lasater was a major contributor to Clinton’s permanent campaign, donating money to his gubernatorial races and holding fundraisers. His brokerage house, meanwhile, received $1.6 million in fees for its role in handling tax-exempt bonds for the state. Clinton personally lobbied the legislature in 1985 to give Lasater’s firm a contract to sell bonds for a state police radio system. The governor and his wife occasionally flew on Lasater’s corporate jet. When Lasater was promoting a special vacation package at Angel Fire, his 22,000-acre ski resort in New Mexico, he used Governor Clinton’s name in his mailings, although Clinton did not make the trip. Patsy Thomasson, the executive vice president of Lasater Inc., was a Democratic party activist who had been appointed to the state highway commission by Clinton, her long-time friend. After serving time in prison, Lasater was later pardoned by Clinton.

  The prosecution of Roger Clinton did have some positive side effects. Asa Hutchinson, then the Republican federal prosecutor in Little Rock, believed that Roger’s conviction and his later testimony in other cases helped stem an emerging cocaine party scene in central Arkansas. “Here the brother of the governor was saying, ‘Hey, nobody touches me, look who I am!’ And people had come to think it was all right,” Hutchinson recalled. “The case was important in showing people they couldn’t do that.” It was also important, Bill Clinton came to believe, in saving his brother’s life.

  “WE’RE closer than any brothers you’ve ever known,” Roger Clinton was heard saying about his relationship with his brother the governor during one of the secretly tape-recorded conversations with Rodney Myers. “See, I didn’t have a father growing up and he was like a father to me growing up, all my life, so that’s why we’ve always been so close. There isn’t anything in the world he wouldn’t do for me.”

  Minutes before he described that brotherly bond, twenty-eight-year-old Roger had inhaled cocaine through his nose. He and Myers were in the middle of a rambling discussion during which they rated the quality of their cocaine (Myers: “Boy, this is some good coke!” Clinton: “It’s decent. It’s decent”) … and discussed the high-rolling lives of wealthy lawyer friends who rode in white limousines and partied in hot tubs … and told tall tales about busting heads in a Fayetteville brawl … and fantasized about how they were going to make so much money in condominium deals that they could have generous clothing allowances and new cars (Clinton: “What I’ve been saving up for is a Porsche.” Myers: “What kind?” Clinton: “Just any kind. Just any kind.” Myers: “Right. You want a Porsche?” Clinton: “I want a Porsche so bad I can spit” ) … and agreed that Roger’s name would help them put the deals together (Myers: “If I had you on my side, I could make a hell of a lot of money, you know, with your last name.” Clinton: “Oh, listen, I realize exactly what you’re saying.” Myers: “You got good bullshit. You got your bullshit but your last name would also make, you know, you could make a hell of a lot.” Clinton: “Good at bullshitting and public relations. I can sell a product.”).

  Roger Clinton would call Bill “Big Brother” when talking about him to other people. Not “my big brother,” just “Big Brother,” with the double meaning explicit. They were of different generations, though separated only by ten years, each with soft blue eyes and big hands, raised by the same woman with the same unconditional love. When her boy Bill had left for good from Scully Street, Virginia had taken down his plaques and awards and rearranged the house to make it more accommodating as a rehearsal space for Roger’s first rock band, The Hundred Millimeter Banana, which he formed at age ten. She wanted him to become the next Elvis as much as she wanted Bill to become the next JFK. When he started to get club dates with another band, Dealer’s Choice, she went to see him perform, even at a topless lounge named the Black Orchid, and listened to him sing with the same pride with which she listened to her son the politician talk. She got a list of Roger’s club dates and studied it with the same pleasure that she perused Bill’s weekly schedule, sent to her by the governor’s office. She loved her sons with equal intensity, she told her friends. But one son had the will and one son did not.

  How could two brothers be so different: the governor and the coke dealer, the Rhodes Scholar and the college dropout, one who tried to read three hundred books in three months and another who at his most addicted snorted cocaine sixteen times a day, one who could spend hours explaining economic theories and another whose economic interests centered on getting a new Porsche? In the case of the Clinton brothers, the contrasts become more understandable when considered within the context of their family history and environment. They grew up in a town of contrast and hypocrisy, in a family of duality and conflict. Bill and Roger were not so much opposites a
s two sides of the same coin. Each essentially grew up without a father. Bill was constantly searching for older male role models: his pappaw Eldridge Cassidy, Virgil Spurlin at school, his grandmother’s brother Buddy Grisham, his friend Jim Blair, his adviser Maurice Smith, his minister W. O. Vaught. Bill was the closest thing to a role model Roger could find.

  By their chosen careers, Bill the politician and Roger the rock musician revealed a common desire to perform and to gain approval from large audiences. Virginia often said that her boys resembled her in that respect. Like her son Roger, she loved to jump on stage and sing along with the band; and like her son Bill, she would walk into a room and try to win over every person there. Another common denominator for the politician and the rock musician is sex. Performers in both realms are often surrounded by groupies, their sexual charisma enhanced by power and unrestrained ego. The desire to perform, the need for approval, and the supply of idolaters can be a habit-forming triangle.