First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Every boy in the school had a crush on the music teacher, who was sweet, young, and perfumed. She taught them once a week, and during her class the students would clamor for her to let them act out the folk song “Froggie Went A-Courtin’.” The boys always wanted their teacher to play the part of Miss Mousie so that they could fantasize courting her. When she played that part, she picked Billy to be Froggie.

  “Miss Mousie, will you marry me? Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Billy Clinton sang.

  “Without my Uncle Rat’s consent, Uh-huh, uh-huh,” the teacher sang back. “Without my Uncle Rat’s consent, I would not marry the president Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  IN ALL HIS GLORY

  TO OPEN THE side door and enter the tan brick ranch house near the corner of Scully and Wheatley streets where the Clinton family lived during Bill’s high school days was to visit a shrine to the oldest son. He was, at seven-teen, during his final year at home, if not the master of his house at least the central force within it. One wall in the living room displayed his teenage accomplishments: a studio portrait of him from the year before, when he was junior class president, circled by a solar system of scholastic awards, Boys Nation mementos, and framed band contest medals. The refrigerator was stocked to his taste. An easy push on the foot pedal and the freezer would spring open to a half-gallon supply of his favorite peach ice cream; without asking, he would scoop it out in two huge mounds, one for himself, one for a visitor. Jars of peanut butter were always in the cupboard, with fruit on the counter so that he could satisfy his desire for peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Friends marveled at the speed with which he knifed banana slices into neat rows atop the bread. His bedroom was the largest in the house, the master bedroom really, with its own bath. In the carport sat the black four-door finned Buick that he drove to Hot Springs High School, along with the family’s cream yellow Henry J coupe that he took out on special weekends.

  The primacy of the senior son within the Clinton nuclear family—Bill, mother Virginia, stepfather Roger Clinton, and seven-year-old half brother Roger Cassidy Clinton—was in one sense not so unusual. It reflected the middle American cultural inclinations of that time and place, where towns gilded their teenagers with the status of golden youth, destined to better fortunes than the generation before, demigods of the classroom and playing field, their daily lives primed for competition and rewards. David Leopoulos, Clinton’s closest childhood friend, thought of Hot Springs circa 1963 as an olfactory sensation, a sweet pine scent of innocent pleasure evoking a time when “it seemed to us that the whole town was made specially for teenagers.” It was an aroma so powerful and lingering that it could overwhelm Leopoulos decades later as it took him back down the streets of his teenage years, to Cook’s ice cream parlor and the A&W Drive-in along Albert Pike, to the forest lookout and parking hideaways on the mountain ridge above downtown, to the pep rallies, concerts, dances, and festivals at the Gothic red brick high school. The feel of the town and the generational aspirations of middle-class parents convinced the high school seniors that they owned the world. Members of their class, according to Bobby Haness, who competed with Clinton for top math scores, were treated as “the Chosen Ones—we were made to feel different and better.” But that explains only part of what was happening on Scully Street, where the household was struggling with Roger Clinton’s alcoholism. In the literature on children of alcoholics, there is a type sometimes referred to as the Family Hero, who plays one of two well-defined roles, either as caretaker and protector of the family or as its redeemer to the outside world. As protector, the Family Hero, usually the oldest child, assumes adult responsibilities and provides an anchor of coherence to siblings and parents, leading to an attitude that things are always better, the family safer, when this person is in charge. As redeemer, the Family Hero is often excused from the family’s inner burdens and dispatched into the world to excel and to return with praise and rewards that will make the entire unit feel worthy. In this role, the Family Hero becomes a vessel of ambition and the repository of hope. Bill Clinton, during his high school years, was the prototype of the Family Hero in both definitions.

  The Scully Street house itself represented Virginia Clinton’s best effort to escape her marriage. It was a solid but modest dwelling hidden away in a hodgepodge neighborhood of working-class shacks and brick ramblers in the lowlands across the south side railroad tracks. It seemed like a step down socially from the large frame house high on the hill above Park Avenue that the family had lived in during their first six years in Hot Springs, but it was nonetheless a haven from Roger’s long-term abuse. After secretly saving money for several years in anticipation of escape, Virginia had fled to Scully Street, away from Roger, in the spring of 1962 and filed for divorce, arriving with her boys not long before a vacant field across the street exploded in a brilliant show of magenta, white, and pink peonies, a luxuriant one-acre bouquet that seemed specially arranged for Virginia, a woman as flamboyant and resilient as the blooms. But even as the escape eased their fears, the divorce process was painful, revealing the roles taken within a dysfunctional family. Roger’s drinking and fits of jealousy, Virginia’s perseverance and forgiveness, and the elder son’s burden of responsibility.

  In seeking to end the marriage on grounds of mental cruelty and abuse, Virginia testified in April 1962 that Roger’s drinking, a problem since the start of their marriage, had worsened in recent years. She said there had been two violent eruptions three years earlier, first at a dance when he became drunk and kicked her and struck her, then at home on March 27, 1959, when “he threw me to the floor and began to stomp me, pulled my shoe off and hit me on the head several times.” Virginia separated from Roger briefly after that incident, but took him back when “he promised to quit drinking and treat me with love.” Bill not only comforted his mother during these troubles, he offered her strong testimonial support during the divorce. In his own affidavit, he stated that he was familiar with his step-father’s habitual drinking and had witnessed the second assault on his mother. “I was present March 27, 1959,” he said, “and it was I who called my mother’s attorney who in turn had to get the police to come to the house to arrest the defendant.”

  Roger soon enough broke his promise to quit drinking, and Bill was called in for help again two years later, at a Christmas party in 1961 at the house of a family friend. Virginia said Roger humiliated her that night with verbal abuse. “He was so intoxicated I was unable to get him home,” she said. “I was finally able to get my oldest son Billy to help me with the car and finally able to get him home.” Roger’s explosions were most often jealous rages fueled by alcohol. Although a notorious womanizer himself, he constantly accused his wife of being unfaithful. Virginia was a naturally affectionate woman who loved to hug and schmooze and flirt. As a nurse anesthetist on call whenever the doctors needed her for surgery, her odd hours made Roger suspicious. His distrust was exacerbated by reports he would get from friends that they had seen Virginia drinking coffee with this doctor or that medical supplies dealer.

  “He is very jealous, continually calling to check on my whereabouts, which is causing me considerable embarrassment with the people with whom I have to work,” Virginia testified. His jealousy had shut her off from friends, she said. “He doesn’t want me to go anywhere myself and has refused to let me associate or to have many friends.” His behavior was not only embarrassing her at work, it was also causing her performance to suffer. When she came home at night after work and found him drinking and upset, she would have to stay up so late reasoning with him that she would have a difficult time the following day.

  The oldest son seemed emotionally distraught, not by the physical threats of his stepfather—he loomed over the man—but by the onus the family turmoil placed on him. He had come to understand that if the violence and abuse were to end, he had to be the one to stop them. He was an adolescent put in the position of reversing roles so that, as he later said, “I was the father.” Decades l
ater, Clinton and his mother would recount what they described as a pivotal confrontation between Billy and Roger when Billy was fourteen. According to that later story, Billy stormed into his parents’ bedroom one evening when he heard his stepfather yelling at his mother, demanded that Roger stand and face him, and ordered Roger never to strike his mother again. Virginia claimed afterward that this confrontation put an end to the physical abuse, though the divorce transcripts indicate that Roger continued to torment and threaten her and Billy in the following months. In Bill’s affidavit, taken a few weeks before the divorce but several months after the night when he dressed down his stepfather, he recounted more fights.

  “On one occasion last month I again had to call my mother’s attorney because of the defendant’s conduct causing physical abuse to my mother and the police again had to be summoned to the house,” he stated. “He has threatened my mother on a number of occasions and because of his nagging, arguing with my mother I can tell that she is very unhappy and it is impossible in my opinion for them to continue to live together as husband and wife. The last occasion in which I went to my mother’s aid when he was abusing my mother he threatened to mash my face in if I took her part.”

  Days after the divorce was granted on May 15, 1962, Virginia began reconsidering. Her love for Roger was gone, yet she felt sorry for him. He pleaded with her once again to take him back and again promised that he would reform. For days at a time he would park his car near the peony field across the street from the house and sit out there for hours, pathetically watching the family that had turned away from him. Whatever fears lingered in Virginia were overtaken by a nurturing sense that he could not make it alone. Billy was upset when he learned of the possible reconcilia-tion. He had already told the court that he did not believe his parents could live together any longer as man and wife, and now he had to convince his mother. “Mother,” he said, instructing her in how to live her life for the first time, “you’re making a mistake to take him back.”

  The only Roger Clinton that Bill cared about then was Roger Cassidy Clinton, who called the big brother he adored “Bubba.” Bill felt so protective and responsible for little Roger that he did something that on the surface seemed contrary to his expressed feelings about the old man, unless considered in the light of brotherly love and maternal pressure. Despite the fact that his mother had just divorced Roger Clinton, Bill went to the Garland County Courthouse and officially changed his name from William Jefferson Blythe to William Jefferson Clinton. Why would he take the surname of an alcoholic stepfather who threatened him, a man who had never formally adopted him and who he hoped never would be part of the family again? He explained later that it was because he wanted to share the same last name with his little brother: “I decided it was something I ought to do. I thought it would be a gesture of family solidarity. And I thought it would be good for my brother, who was coming up.” His mother encouraged the change. He had always been known in school records as William J. Clinton, she told the court, and there were “no pleasant associations connected with the name of Blythe as he never did know his father.”

  Within two months, Virginia took Roger Clinton back. They remarried in August 1962. Roger was ensconced in the house on Scully Street and everyone there legally carried his name, even the boy he had never adopted. But it was not his castle. He lived there more now as a tolerated guest, a boarder. By the time Bill began his senior year in the fall of 1963, everything in the house revolved around the golden son. Roger Clinton would sit for hours at night in a swivel chair in the rec room on the far side of the dinette in the back of the house, a tumbler of liquor at his side, watching television through trifocal eyeglasses or listening to his collection of jazz records: Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and the Dorsey Brothers. In his younger days, when he was cool and handsome and his nickname was “Dude,” he had spent most of his after hours partying at downtown clubs. Now his drinking was more private. He stashed liquor miniatures around the house and in tool bins at the auto parts shop he ran at his older brother’s Buick dealership. His history of verbal and physical abuse, while known among the adults of Hot Springs, was largely shielded from Bill’s friends. Carolyn Yeldell, a schoolmate who lived next door, was in and out of the Clinton house every week for the final two years of high school without learning the depth of the Clinton family’s duress.

  CLINTON held no elective office at school his senior year. He had planned to run for student body president, the logical progression from junior class president, but the principal, Mrs. Mackey, called him in after school one day, along with his friend Phil (Jet) Jamison, who had also filed to run, and told them that they were spreading themselves too thin. She said she needed someone who could give the council full attention, not just do it with one hand while also playing football or running track or leading the band. She had decided to institute a point system for extracurricular activities. No student could exceed ten points per year. Bill, as band major, and Phil, as a football player, already had six points each, and the six points of being student body president would push them over the limit.

  Jamison and Clinton argued vehemently with the principal. They said her plan was unfair, arguing in the abstract so that it would not look as if they only cared about themselves. They respected and feared Mrs. Mackey; she was like a God to the students. Yet now, as they made their points, she started crying. Jamison realized that “she was crying because she believed in the principle of what she had decided to do and was not directing it against us. She thought Bill was the greatest. It hurt her to know we were taking it personally.”

  Mrs. Mackey did not back down. The only office Clinton could hold without going over the point barrier was class secretary, a position that usually went to a girl. He ran for it, challenging Carolyn Yeldell, who was not only his neighbor but a close friend. They ended up in a runoff, standing out in the hallway together as their classmates cast ballots in the auditorium. Billy had a sense that he would lose: Carolyn was his equal as a student leader, a Baptist minister’s daughter who had courted friendships and club memberships with as much intensity as Clinton during their high school years. Whatever he could do, she could do as well, if not better. If he made Boys State, she made Girls State. If he went to Boys Nation in Washington, she went to Girls Nation. If he won a medal for sight-reading on tenor saxophone, she won a medal for singing or piano performance. As they lingered in the hallway, he turned to her. “Carolyn,” he said, “so help me, if you beat me for this, I’ll never forget it.” She won.

  Even without elected office, Clinton was the school’s golden boy. Mrs. Mackey would let him out of class to speak to the Optimists or Elks or the Heart Association about his experiences in Washington at Boys Nation and the desire he felt to do something for his country. The speaking engagements grew so frequent that Mrs. Mackey turned down some requests, fearful that his grades might suffer. Such fears were probably unnecessary. Clinton excelled in class without appearing to study much. David Leo-poulos, who struggled through school, later could not remember Clinton studying in all the time they spent together. Paul Root, who taught world history, recalled that Clinton seemed more at ease than other students. When Root assigned outside readings, Clinton chose George Orwell’s Ani-mal Farm, an allegorical study of totalitarianism. It seemed to Root that Clinton’s interest had nothing to do with what grade he might get for the report. He was totally absorbed in the theme within the book: power, how one gains and holds power. “Bill loved to argue, to debate, but he never appeared worried about the subject matter. He just played with it.”

  That is not to say that Bill Clinton was noncompetitive. He always wanted to win. During his sophomore year when the students from different junior highs joined together for the first day of intermediate Latin, their teacher, Elizabeth Buck, asked them to translate a speech of Julius Caesar’s. Clinton zipped through three-quarters of the material, far more than anyone before him, and sat back proudly at his desk. Then along came Phil Jamison, who at a differe
nt junior high had had a more demanding Latin teacher. Jamison recited the entire text fluently. Although Clinton graciously congratulated Jamison at the time, he brought it up for weeks thereafter, and Jamison could tell that behind the smiles his friend was upset.

  Hot Springs High was the coveted public school among the seven whites-only secondary schools in Garland County, the local equivalent of a top private institution: rich and academically driven, with a cadre of teachers who had devoted their lives to the school. Mrs. Buck, who taught Latin for four decades, was exacting and inspirational. When students entered her classroom, they first contemplated her Thought for the Day, taken from classical texts. Her favorite was from Hamlet, Polonius’s advice to his son Laertes. She would write it in chalk in her perfect blackboard style: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

  The students enjoyed the way she brought a dead language to life, dressing them in togas as they performed plays and readings from ancient Rome. One day they were reading from Cicero and Mrs. Buck decided that they should put Cicero’s arch enemy, Catiline, on trial. Catiline was the Huey Long of the first century B.C., covering his reckless ambition in the rhetoric of populism, inciting the oppressed masses in his plots for power, which included plans to kill Cicero and take over the imperial city. As Mrs. Buck was about to assign roles, she later recalled, “Billy Clinton raised his hand and said, ‘Let me be the lawyer,’ defending Catiline.”

  “I said, ‘Don’t you know you have a lost case before you start?ߣ”

  “And he said, ‘I really want to try it.’ And so he did.”

  He put up a vigorous defense and became enraptured with the court-room, where he had a captive audience susceptible to his powers of per-suasion, a focus group for his budding rhetorical and political skills. Defending Catiline, he told Mrs. Buck, made him realize that someday he would study law.