First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Two days later, back in Little Rock, Clinton made an appearance at the Governor’s Quality Conference in a ballroom at the Excelsior Hotel. Paula Corbin Jones, then a twenty-four-year-old secretary for the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, which was sponsoring the conference, was working at the reception desk outside the ballroom. According to an account she would give three years later, which Clinton denies, the governor stared at her as he stood nearby, and then later dispatched one of his state troopers to solicit her. Handing her a piece of paper with a room number on it, the trooper, according to her account, said that Clinton wanted to meet her in his room. She said that she went out of curiosity. Inside the room, she said, Clinton kissed her on the neck, placed a hand on her thigh, said that he liked the curves of her body and the flow of her hair, turned “beet red,” and asked her to perform a sex act. She refused, she said, and quickly left.

  IN June and July, Clinton talked to scores of friends about whether he should run for president. He could present a convincing case either way, as he always could. One of his arguments on the negative side had echoes of 1987. He would say that he was not sure that Chelsea was ready. There was a new problem as well: his promise to the voters of Arkansas that he would serve out his term as governor. Hillary seemed not merely ready this time, but eager, as were most of their friends. On August 14, Hillary Clinton went up to Bentonville for a meeting of the Wal-Mart environmental board, which she chaired. Texas Land Commissioner Garry Mauro, and Roy Spence, head of an Austin advertising firm, were also there. They had known Clinton and Rodharn since the McGovern campaign in Texas in 1972. Now Mauro was on the Wal-Mart environmental board with Hillary, and Spence had the company’s advertising account. After the meeting, Hillary turned to Spence, who had rented a car, and said, “Let’s drive around.” Spence drove aimlessly. Mauro sat in the back and Hillary in front. “We’re thinking about doing it,” Hillary said. “We’re thinking about going forward with this great adventure. What do you all think?”

  “This is what we’ve been waiting for, for a long time,” Spence said.

  Hillary said there were some problems and she needed their advice. “Bill made a contract with the people of Arkansas to not run and he’s really worried about it,” she said.

  Spence said it was important to “lance that boil.”

  How? asked Hillary.

  “Your enemies will hold it against you, but your friends don’t have to,” Spence said. “They’ll want you to run. Get in the car and drive around Arkansas and seek the counsel of the family members.”

  They drove around for another half-hour, and then Spence circled back to the Wal-Mart parking lot and turned off the engine. “You know, Roy, they’ll say a lot of things about our marriage,” Hillary said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What should we do about that?”

  “Admit it. Early.”

  A few days later, Clinton drove around Arkansas in what was called “The Secret Tour.” In town after town, he told supporters that he felt troubled about breaking his pledge to serve out his term. Everywhere he went, people told him to run. He was participating in a well-scripted skit. Not long after he finished, he announced the formation of an exploratory committee, the first formal step on the way toward an announcement. The next three steps were taken in sequence when the Clintons visited Washington in mid-September. First, in a day-long session chaired by Mickey Kantor in a meeting room at the Washington Court Hotel, they met with about twenty political friends and allies and plotted the strategy and mechanics of a campaign: what issues to emphasize, how to put together a staff and raise money. Kantor gingerly broached the subject of how Clinton intended to deal with questions about infidelity.

  That subject got a more thorough vetting later at a meeting in Frank Greer’s office attended by a smaller group that included the Clintons, Bruce Lindsey, Greer, and Stan Greenberg. In dealing with reporters and political operatives all summer, Greer had come to realize that Clinton had “an incredible reputation around town” for philandering. The next morning, Clinton was scheduled to meet the elite of Washington’s political press corps at a traditional function known as the Sperling Breakfast, founded by Godfrey Sperling, Jr., of the Christian Science Monitor. What should he do, if anything, to assure this crowd that his personal life was under control, that he would not implode like Gary Hart? The mention of the subject irked Clinton. The rules had changed since Hart, he said. Now there was so much hypocrisy involved. If you just go out and divorce your wife, you never have to deal with this. But if you work at your problems, if you make a commitment, then you do. So people are rewarded in politics if they divorce their wives. That was the genesis of the answer they decided Clinton should give at the Sperling Breakfast. He would say that he had had some problems, but that he and Hillary worked things through and they were committed to their marriage.

  Clinton and Hillary left for dinner. When Clinton came back a few hours later, he told Greer, “Hell, I just had dinner with Vernon Jordan and Jordan said, ‘Screw ’em! Don’t tell ’em anything!’”

  That probably would not work, Clinton was told.

  The next morning, before the breakfast, Greer encouraged several reporters to ask a question about Clinton’s sex life. No one seemed eager to do it. Finally, as the session was nearing an end, the question came up. Clinton replied that it was the sort of trivia that people obsessed about while Rome was in decline. But on this occasion, with Hillary at his side, he added: “Like nearly anybody who has been together for twenty years, our relationship has not been perfect or free from difficulties, but we feel good about where we are and we believe in our obligation to each other, and we intend to be together thirty or forty years from now, whether I run for president or not.”

  IN the early morning of October 3, Clinton, in his jogging shorts and shoes, headed down the mansion driveway and out the gate, heading north through his neighborhood of Victorian homes and across the bridge over 1-630 into the quiet downtown. The streets counted down as he ran, past Tenth and Ninth and Eighth and Seventh and Sixth and Fifth and Fourth and Third and Second, until he arrived at East Markham Street, one block from the Arkansas River. He loped past the Old State House. In a few short hours, at noon, he would stand there, on a platform framed by twelve American flags and four grand white columns, and say the words he could not bring himself to say four years earlier, words that he had wanted to say for so long.

  He had been up until at least two-thirty the night before, sitting at his oversized chair in the breakfast nook next to the kitchen, making telephone calls, nibbling on a banana with peanut butter spread on it, working through the final drafts of his speech with a team of writers: Bruce Reed from the DLC, pollster Greenberg, consultant Greer, and the author Tommy Caplan, his friend from Georgetown. Now the speech was typed and printed, and Greer had already slipped embargoed copies to the wire services, hoping that he could thereby prevent Clinton from making too many of his last-minute revisions. Greer and Reed were waiting for him when he returned from his jog. It looked beautiful down there at the Old State House, he told them. With Clinton still sweating in his running clothes, Greer positioned him in front of a portable bar, which they pretended was a podium, and had him rehearse the speech. His allergies were flaring and they worried about his voice. The speech seemed too long; they cut several lines. The last thing Clinton wanted was to remind anyone that he was the guy whose most famous speech prompted members of the audience to chant: “Get the hook!”

  At eleven-thirty, everyone was ready to go except Clinton. He was in his room, rummaging through his closet, searching for a tie that looked presidential. He settled on one that was dark blue with diagonal stripes.

  It was a glorious high autumn day, clear and golden. The crowd gathering in front of the Old State House was in a festive mood. There were a few thousand people there, legislators, state workers, curious onlookers, staff members, friends. As Diane Blair approached the black iron gate leading onto the lawn, she stopp
ed for a moment. There on the sidewalk in front of her stood Orval Faubus, symbol of the Old South, an ancient and lonely man, reduced to a sideshow, hawking one of his books. A television crew swept past, oblivious of the old governor’s presence. History rises, Blair thought, and history rejects.

  Clinton gave a speech that lasted thirty-two minutes, the precise length of his ill-fated address in Atlanta. Few complained. No red lights flashed. He mentioned the middle class twelve times. He recalled the lasting message of his favorite professor at Georgetown, Carroll Quigley, who said that America was the greatest country in history because it was rooted in the belief that the future would be better than the present. He talked about how his grandparents had taken care of him while his mother was away at nursing school. He said that southerners had been divided by race for too long. Twice he evoked John F. Kennedy. He delivered his New Democrat riffs on opportunity and responsibility and how he favored change that was neither liberal nor conservative but both and different. But there was one line in the speech that had been the easiest to write and that he now proclaimed with the most energy and emotion. It was the first line of the twenty-third paragraph. It went: “That is why today I am declaring my candidacy for President of the United States.”

  His mother was there to hear him say those words. She had been waiting to hear them since he was a boy. She was the one who had taught him how to block things out and keep going through tough times. She gave him his perseverance and his optimism. Now she was determined to play out one final act of will. Four months earlier, her doctor had told her that her breast cancer had spread and that she was dying. She had not told her son. She hoped not to tell him until he was president of the United States.

  Carolyn Staley and David Leopoulos were nearby, amid a group of special guests in a front-row section cordoned off with a golden rope. The two friends from Hot Springs were overwhelmed when Clinton finished speaking and stood on the podium with Hillary and Chelsea. They were so close to him that they could reach out and touch his feet, yet they felt oddly further from him than ever before. All three Clintons had tears in their eyes and Leopoulos thought they looked “scared to death,” as though they had stepped past a point of no return.

  Tommy Caplan, Clinton’s Georgetown roommate, lingered off to the side, thinking back to their senior year in college, before Robert Kennedy was killed, when he and his friend both believed it was possible for a politician to heal a country.

  Bob Reich had flown down to Little Rock that morning, unexpected, and stood under the shade of a column as he listened. When he noticed the tear in Chelsea’s eye, he became overtaken by emotion himself and thought, “I just hope to God they know what they’re getting into.” At that moment, he would say later, he had a vision that he was witnessing a momentous occasion “in an extreme and classic sense of momentous.” His vision was that his old Rhodes pal at Univ College would be elected president. He left for the airport soon after the speech, without even letting Clinton know that he had been there, and flew back to Cambridge, where, once again using Strobe Talbott as his foil, he would write in the annual class letter: “Bill Clinton’s candidacy makes Strobe Talbott feel old. However, the prospect that all of us will flock to Washington when Bill wins makes him feel good.”

  Carl Wagner, who had spent several hours talking to Clinton and Hillary on the eve of his decision not to run four years earlier, had a sensation similar to Reich’s. He thought back two decades to the summer of 1970 when he and Clinton walked up to Capitol Hill to try to persuade congressmen to cut off funds for the Vietnam War. Here, finally, is the day, Wagner thought. Here is the day for their generation.

  Diane Blair looked up at Hillary, with her rich red suit and brilliant red lipstick, her face made up and her hair coiffeured, and remembered their days as young professors in Fayetteville. She grinned to herself, Blair recalled, as she thought back to the era when Hillary “had looked so much less glamorous.” Then she felt a chill. It is different, she thought. Nothing will ever be the same.

  Betsey Wright could not bring herself to drive over to the Old State House. After devoting a decade of her life to Clinton’s political advancement, she was feeling demoralized about him again. With Clinton’s help and encouragement, she had reentered the political world in late 1990 and become the head of the state Democratic party. But one month before Clinton’s announcement, their reconciliation had collapsed in a bitter misunderstanding over money, she had been trying to raise it for the state party and felt that he had directly competed with her by soliciting funds for the DLC. The dispute had prompted her to quit as director of the state party. While Clinton was announcing for president, thanking his friends for “filling my life full of blessings beyond anything I ever deserved,” Wright was back at her house on Hill Street, alone.

  Cliff Jackson was also at home in Little Rock, sitting at his desk, his television tuned to the speech. Jackson, who had first met Clinton when they played basketball together at Oxford, had been following his fellow Arkansan’s political rise with dismay and a sense of inevitability. He had distrusted Clinton since the summer of 1969, when he thought that Clinton had manipulated him in an effort to avert the military draft. He had been mostly silent about it for decades, but no more. He and several conservative associates had just formed an anti-Clinton group called the Alliance for Rebirth of an Independent America. They were raising money to fund newspaper and radio commercials attacking Clinton’s record. The first one ran in the Arkansas Democrat on this morning of the announcement. Now Jackson, a lawyer, was spending his lunch hour alone in his den, watching his long-ago rival declare that he was a candidate for president. “I’ve always known that we would come to this time and place,” Jackson said to himself. “I’ve always known.”

  When the cheering stopped, Clinton and his family entered the Old State House for a small reception. Chelsea took a place in line, and when she reached the front she shook her father’s hand and said, “Congratulations, that was a fine speech, Governor.” Clinton spent several hours that afternoon shaking hands at a larger reception at the Excelsior. There were more receptions that night back at the mansion. By eleven, Hillary was tired and ready for bed. Clinton stayed up with a small band of friends who had gathered around Carolyn Staley at the piano. They sang a medley of Motown songs, followed by “Abraham, Martin and John,” the anthem to political martyrs. Clinton sat beside Carolyn on the bench and sang every verse. He knew all the words.

  Soon the room fell quiet as Carolyn played the opening chords to her friend’s favorite hymn. It was approaching midnight on the first day of his campaign for president and William Jefferson Clinton was in full voice. “A-a-ma-zing grace!” he sang. “How sweet the sound. That saved a-a wretch like me. I-I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind, but now I see.”

  NOTES

  Prologue: Washington, D.C., 1963

  11 The boys rode down: Ints. Larry Taunton, March 12, 1993; Daniel O’Connor, April 6, 1993; and Jack Mercier, April 6, 1993.

  12 They made no secret: Int. Richard Stratton, April 5, 1993.

  12 O’Connor knew: Int. Daniel J. O’Connor, April 6, 1993.

  14 In his speeches: Int. Thomas McLarty, April 19, 1993.

  15 “It’s the biggest thrill”: Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, June 1963.

  15 Amid the excitement: Int. Larry Taunton, March 12, 1993.

  15 She loved to tell: Int. Virginia Kelley, Jan. 13, 1992.

  15 The eighteenth annual: Boys Nation program, July 19-26, 1963, The American Legion.

  15 The official politicking: Senior Scholastic, Sept. 23, 1963.

  16 The looming danger: The Washington Post (cited hereafter as WP), July 24, 1963.

  16 where the local Lions: Int. Ron Cecil, Jan. 3, 1994.

  16 His mother would: Int. Virginia Kelley, Jan. 13, 1992.

  16 Most of the boys: Int. O. L. Johnson, March 10, 1993.

  16 With both parties: Senior Scholastic, Sept. 23, 1963.

  17 The Arkansas luncheo
n quartet: Int. Larry Taunton, March 12, 1993.

  17 “the cat’s meow”: Int. Bill Clinton, Aug. 6, 1992.

  17 Clinton wanted to be vice president: Int. John E. Mills, March 11, 1993.

  18 Fred Kammer squirmed. Int. Fred Kammer, Feb. 26, 1993.

  18 A year later: Int. Richard Stratton, April 5, 1993.

  18 It got quiet: Ints. Richard Stralton, April 5, 1993, and Larry Taunton, March 12, 1993.

  19 At quarter to ten: Transcript and tape of President Kennedy’s speech to Boys Nation, July 24, 1963, JFK Library.

  20 After an early lunch: Int. O. L. Johnson, March 10, 1993.

  20 The next morning: Ints. Larry Taunton, March 12, 1993, and Jack Mercier, April 6, 1993.

  One: Hope and Chance