First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  • • •

  THE year 1990 presented Clinton with one of the toughest political decisions of his career. He had been governor for ten of the last twelve years. What more could he do? he asked his advisers. He seemed tired of the job and feared that the people of Arkansas had grown weary of him. Those were strong reasons not to seek a fifth term. His concern about losing a forum could be alleviated somewhat by another national leadership position that he was assuming, as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a faction of moderates, many of them from the South, who sought to reorient the party toward the white middle class. There were also persuasive reasons to remain in the governor’s office. If he left and started running for president as a former governor, he would be depriving himself of status and a financial power base, especially if President Bush appeared unbeatable in 1992 and Clinton ended up postponing his national run until 1996. He was getting strong advice from former governors, including Jim Hunt of North Carolina and Richard Riley of South Carolina, not to give up the job until he had to: they missed it, they said, and he would, too.

  Clinton’s state of mind further complicated the decision. Although he was developing new themes on the national level, back home, in his role as governor, he seemed to be “dithering and depressed,” in the view of Dick Morris, who had helped construct the permanent campaign that had carried him through the eighties. Clinton’s dilemma, as Morris viewed it, was that he was temporarily without a crusade, such as education reform or economic development, and that he was incapable of being a caretaker chief executive. He had to be engaged in “some important, valiant fight for the good of the world to lend coherence and structure to his life, and when he didn’t have those fights he would turn on himself, he would eat away at himself, he would become depressed, paranoid, surly and, one suspects, escapist.” Clinton was an activist, Morris concluded, “because it was the only way he could maintain any reasonable degree of psychological coherence.”

  Clinton’s decision-making process in 1990 followed the same wavering pattern as his deliberations about running for president in 1987. During the first two weeks of February, there were fresh rumors every day. One of the most popular, promoted by several of her friends in the Little Rock legal community, was that Hillary would run instead. She seemed as unclear as anyone else about her husband’s plans, even after he had scheduled a press conference at which he was to announce his decison. On the day before the event, according to Gloria Cabe, Hillary called her and asked whether she had any inside information on what Clinton had decided. Betsey Wright, who was still on leave from her post as chief of staff, talked to him the morning of the announcement and was convinced that up to thirty minutes beforehand he intended to relinquish the governorship. Cabe was among those who thought he had decided not to run but changed his mind when he entered the room and began to speak. David Leopoulos, Clinton’s high school friend, later recalled that “you could have knocked Hillary over with a feather” when Clinton declared that he was seeking another term. “She did not expect it. None of us did.”

  THE notion that Bill Clinton began his political career as a radical and moved inexorably rightward over the decades is misleading. He was a cautious defender of the establishment during his student politics days at Georgetown. In his Oxford and Yale years, he was in the moderate wing of the antiwar movement. From the beginning of his ascent in Arkansas, he would attack organized labor and court corporate interests when it served his political purposes. He had supported the death penalty since his 1976 race for attorney general. As early as his 1980 speech at the Democratic National Convention in New York, he was turning away from traditional liberal Democratic rhetoric. The sphere in which his movement from left to right seemed most apparent was foreign policy. There is a considerable ideological gap between his antiwar letter to Colonel Holmes, in which he disparaged the military, and his decision in the late 1980s to let the Arkansas National Guard participate in controversial training missions in Central America, at a time when some other governors, who opposed the Reagan administration policies there, refused to let their troops go. But in the full context of his political life, his letter to Colonel Holmes was the aberration, his decision on the National Guard the norm.

  On race relations, Clinton used his power as governor to accomplish many of the integrationist goals he had carried since his youth in Hot Springs. He appointed more blacks to state boards and commissions than had all previous Arkansas governors combined. He appointed the first black lawyer to the state Supreme Court, instilled a black woman as the state health chief, and surrounded himself with African Americans in key financial posts, including director of the Department of Finance and Administration. He and Hillary sent Chelsea to a public school in Little Rock that was 60 percent black. But as a politician seeking to survive in a state dominated by conservative white voters—the black population in Arkansas was about 15 percent, the lowest percentage in the South—Clinton was not always able or willing to advance the causes of black activists. Arkansas was one of only two states without a state civil rights law, and he could not persuade the legislature to fund a human rights commission. In 1989, as one of three members of the state Board of Apportionment, Clinton disappointed many of his black supporters by voting to appeal a federal court ruling that substantially increased the number of majority-black legislative districts. He said that he voted for the appeal, which eventually was dismissed, for technical reasons: the apportionment board needed guidance from the high court on its role in redistricting because the 1990 census was approaching.

  Clinton’s policy choices throughout the 1980s reflect an activist nature more than shifting ideology. In his effort to reform the education system, he turned to the regressive sales tax as the surest way to get the money. In seeking to lower the state’s unemployment rate, which hovered above 12 percent when he returned to office in 1983 but had dropped to under 7 percent by the end of the decade, he often backed away from strict environmental enforcement and gave major corporations large tax breaks to stay in Arkansas and expand their operations. Tyson Foods received $7.8 million in tax breaks from 1988 to 1990 at a time when the world’s largest poultry firm had a budget twice as large as the state’s. After occasional battles over taxes, lobbying laws, and municipal bond practices, Clinton and the Arkansas business establishment had reached a level of mutual accommodation. He was accepting free rides in corporate jets (Tyson had flown him on nine trips) and soliciting large contributions from corporate leaders for the public relations arm of his permanent campaign. If he was not exactly one of the money boys, he was accepted to the point where Little Rock bankers called him “Pards,” the abbreviated form of “Partner” in the southwestern subculture of oil and finance. Hillary, in her pursuit of financial security, had joined the boards of several corporations, including two of the largest in Arkansas, Wal-Mart and TCBY, the yogurt enterprise.

  By the time Clinton began his campaign for a fifth term, which would make him the longest-tenured governor in Arkansas history, he was such a large, familiar figure in the state that he faced the ultimate political paradox. His self-image had always been one of action and change, yet now, inevitably, he had come to represent permanence and stability. He was approaching a potential fatal point where polls showed that he was more popular than electable: more people gave him a high approval rating than wanted to vote for him. His opponent in the Democratic primary, a liberal policy analyst named Tom McRae, played on this mood with an anti-Clinton ad that showed a line of clocks stretching into infinity. Clinton’s campaign was burdened with a sense that he was stretching his time in office. Many of his longtime county chairs were exhausted from the permanent campaign and unprepared for another grueling round. Gloria Cabe, who had taken over as campaign manager for Betsey Wright, had to recruit an almost entirely new network of workers. Wright felt that Cabe had betrayed her by taking the job. Dick Morris, an ally of Wright’s, would not deal with Cabe and kept pestering Clinton to rehire Wright. Cabe wanted noth
ing to do with Morris and was furious that Clinton and Hillary still dealt with a political operative whose other clients were Republicans.

  One day at the Governor’s Mansion, after a meeting of Clinton, Hillary, Cabe, and Morris, the relationship between the governor and his consultant exploded. Clinton was on edge, worried that he had made a mistake by entering the race. Morris was hounding Clinton about his treatment of Betsey Wright. They got into a shouting match near the side porch, with Morris, nearly a foot shorter than the governor, screaming up into his face. As Hillary and Cabe stood by, Clinton suddenly lost control, according to Cabe, and slugged Morris, sending him reeling. “Clinton apologized,” Cabe later recalled. “But he was still pissed.” Morris did not resign. He stayed on for the rest of the campaign, though every now and then, according to Cabe, he would mutter, “I can’t believe Clinton hit me!”

  The most memorable moment in the primary came when Tom McRae held a press conference at the Capitol and Hillary started heckling him from the back of the crowd. “Get off it, Tom!” she shouted, as McRae criticized Clinton’s record. It had the feel of a spontaneous encounter, the proud wife defending her man. In fact, it had been scripted. At a strategy meeting the day before, the Clinton team had decided that McRae needed to be confronted. “We have to take this guy on!” Hillary had said, and then she went out and did it. What effect it had is a matter of dispute. McRae later claimed that he won the rural women’s vote because of it. But Clinton won the primary.

  In the general election, Clinton faced Republican Sheffield Nelson, a former Democrat who ran Arkansas-Louisiana Gas Company, the state’s largest gas utility. During Clinton’s first term, he and Nelson had been allies. “If Sheffield Nelson called the office, he was talking to Bill Clinton,” former aide Randy White recalled of those early days. “If Nelson wanted Bill Clinton in his office, he would be there.” They had several mutual friends, including Clinton’s childhood pal, Mack McLarty, who would succeed Nelson at Arkla, but over the years Clinton and Nelson grew to hate each other. They both came out of small-town Arkansas, Nelson with an even more deprived background than Clinton. They were competitive, ambitious, complicated men who enjoyed nothing more than gathering rumors and private reports on the other’s actions and then spreading the word around town. There was enough material on both sides to keep the gossip flowing. It was a private war conducted at a level beneath the public campaign.

  Clinton had reinforced his general election team with outsiders, including Frank Greer, a Washington-based media consultant, and pollster Stanley Greenberg, an expert on the use of focus groups. Greer had long considered Clinton presidential material and viewed the gubernatorial race as a warmup for 1992. In recruiting Greer, in fact, Clinton had said, “You always wanted me to run for president. But let me tell you, if I lose this race for governor, I’ll never get elected dog catcher.” Not long after Greer signed on, Clinton attended a debate at which he was asked whether if he won the election he would serve out his full term as governor. “You bet,” he said impulsively.

  Cabe called Greer from the debate. “You’re not going to like this,” she said. “Clinton just took himself out of the ’92 race.”

  Greer was shocked. “We had talked a lot about running for president,” he recalled. “I died a thousand deaths. I thought perhaps it wasn’t going to happen. I was bound and determined to tell him to run in 1992.”

  Clinton remained comfortably ahead during the final month of the campaign. In response to the findings of Greenberg’s focus groups, he had repositioned himself as the agent of change, with a new agenda for his next term that concentrated on middle-class concerns. The strategy was effective, but every day in October it seemed that the contest got nastier. Calls were streaming into the campaign office about Clinton’s extramarital sex life. On October 19, Larry Nichols, a former employee of the Arkansas Development Finance Agency, held a press conference announcing that he was filing a lawsuit against Clinton in which he contended that the governor had used a slush fund to entertain at least five women with whom he had affairs. Nichols offered no proof, and the Arkansas press declined to write about the suit or the press conference. Nichols was a familiar character to the local press. He had been fired from the state agency in 1988 after it was discovered that he had made 142 long-distance telephone calls at taxpayer expense to leaders of the Nicaraguan contra movement. Although Nelson maintained that he had no connection to the Nichols lawsuit and the allegations about Clinton’s sex life, workers at his campaign headquarters spread the story to anyone who called.

  According to Nelson’s campaign manager, Paula Unruh, they had taped a commercial attacking Clinton’s personal character but decided not to run it. Instead, during the final days of the campaign, they ran another negative ad portraying Clinton as a big-tax liberal. What has Clinton done and what will he do if he is reelected? the spot asked. The answer, “Raise and spend, raise and spend,” was delivered in Clinton’s voice, taken out of context from his 1989 state of the state address.

  At eleven o’clock on Saturday night of the final weekend before the election, Dick Morris was at a tavern in Westchester County, New York, and about to leave for his home in Connecticut when he decided to call the firm in Atlanta that was doing the tracking polls for Clinton. With Clinton apparently ahead by 15 percentage points, Morris did not consider the final tracking poll a matter of urgency, and acknowledged later that he had it done “just to make it look good as much as anything else.” But when he reached the people in Atlanta, they told him that Clinton had fallen 10 points in three days and was now down to 46 percent. According to Morris, the open-ended question on the poll that asked people what they liked least about Clinton showed that Nelson’s tax ads were having a profound effect. It was well past midnight when he called Clinton at the mansion and gave him the numbers. “I knew it! I knew I was getting killed by that ad!” Morris recalled Clinton saying. “I can feel it!”

  From that point, Morris said, Clinton reacted “as clearheaded as a quarterback under a rush.” They wrote a response ad overnight and produced it early the following morning. The response noted that Nelson had misappropriated Clinton’s state of the state message by lifting the words “raise and spend” from a paragraph that in fact was a criticism of the Reagan administration. To pay for the ads, Clinton took out another personal loan from one of the banks that helped him fund the permanent campaign, the Bank of Perry County, which was owned by Herbie Branscum, a longtime Clinton ally and former chairman of the state Democratic party. Television station managers around the state were called and persuaded to take the response ads immediately and run them Sunday and Monday. Gloria Cabe recruited her teenage daughter to serve as the delivery woman. She and a pilot flew around the state in a thunderstorm to get the tapes to the stations. Another team of volunteer drivers carried the audio responses to dozens of radio stations.

  Clinton defeated Nelson handily that Tuesday, so easily, in fact, that Cabe wondered whether Morris’s final poll could have been accurate. When Morris called her and asked for his payment for the poll, she said she would not give it to him until he provided her with the detailed results. She never got the results, she said later, and she never wrote Morris the check.

  ONE day in December, in the month after the election, Clinton called Gennifer Flowers, one of the women who had been named in the Nichols lawsuit. Clinton did not know that Flowers was tape-recording their conversation. They talked about the lawsuit and Sheffield Nelson. “I stuck it up their ass,” Clinton said. “Nelson called afterwards, you know.” He said that Nelson had claimed that he had nothing to do with the infidelity allegations. “I know he lied. I just wanted to make his asshole pucker,” Clinton said to Flowers. “But I covered you….”

  When AP reporter Bill Simmons had first called him and read him the list, Clinton told Flowers, his response was, “God… I kinda hate to deny that!” He had good taste, Clinton told her. Then he added: “I told you a couple of years ago, one time when I came
to see you, that I had retired. And I’m now glad I have because they scoured the waterfront.”

  AS Ed Howard was moving through the crowd at Oaklawn race track in Hot Springs on Derby Day, April 20, 1991, he saw Governor Clinton approaching from the other direction. Howard was a real estate agent in Malvern. He was a Clinton supporter. He had known Clinton since the summer of 1969, when he served as a drill instructor for the ROTC unit at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He was there when Clinton had signed up for the reserve program as a means of avoiding the draft, and he had been there when Clinton’s letter to Colonel Holmes arrived from Oxford. Nearly ten years later, when Clinton was in his first campaign for governor, Howard had received a call from a Republican political operative who wanted him to go public with his knowledge of Clinton’s actions to avert the draft. Howard had declined. Now another decade had passed, Clinton seemed to be on the verge of running for president, and the questions were coming again. Howard was being pursued by a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette who had heard from an ex-student in Fayetteville about the possible existence of a controversial letter from young Bill Clinton concerning the draft. The reporter had called Howard several times. It was the first thing that crossed Howard’s mind when he saw Clinton at Derby Day. Maybe, he thought, he should tell the governor.

  They shook hands and chatted a minute, and then Howard said that a reporter was on the trail of the letter and the draft.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Clinton. “I’ve put that one to bed.”

  “Okay,” said Howard.

  There was a pause, and then Clinton asked, “What did you tell ’em?”

  “Nothing,” said Howard.

  “Good,” Clinton said.

  LESS than three weeks later, on the morning of May 6 at a convention hall in Cleveland, Ohio, Clinton walked to the podium to give the keynote address at the national meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The session had generated controversy even before it began, with the decision to exclude Jesse Jackson from the list of speakers. Clinton, as the president of the DLC, had taken the brunt of Jackson’s wrath, along with a few sharp criticisms from Ron Brown, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. As Clinton prepared to speak, he took out a single piece of paper that had twenty words scratched on it. From those one-word cues he delivered what many in the audience regarded as the finest political speech of the year. “We’re here to save the United States of America,” he declared, not just the Democratic party. “Our burden is to give the people a new choice rooted in old values. A new choice that is simple, that offers opportunity, demands responsibility, gives citizens more say, provides them responsive government, all because we recognize that we are community. We’re all in this together, and we’re going up or down together.” The buzz in Washington among journalists and political opinion makers was that the Cleveland speech had established Clinton as a serious national figure, one who seemed to have a clear idea of what he wanted to do as president.