On the other end of the spectrum was the senior physics class, taught by a well-meaning man who came straight from the hills. Billy and his friends took advantage of Thural Youngblood from the first day of class, when they decided that he was not their intellectual equal. They spent much of the class talking to each other in a juvenile code language: “E-Ga” meant a girl had a “good bod.” Youngblood tried to discipline the students—Carolyn Yeldell could mimic him chewing out Clinton: “Ah, hey, yum, Bale Clane-ton, you don’t get set down. I’m gun lower your grade from an F to a G, huh.” But physics was a free-for-all. One day Clinton, Jamison, and Ronnie Cecil escorted their teacher to the equipment closet in the back of the room and locked him inside. He banged and pleaded to be let out, but they pretended that the lock was stuck, and studied other subjects and talked among themselves until the bell rang.
The calculus teacher, Mr. Cole, was a serious man who was also the assistant principal. His advanced class had only eight students, and was held in an annex a block down the street from the red brick high school. Clinton and Jamison were there on the afternoon of November 22 that fall when the telephone rang. Cole walked to the back of the room to answer it, listened but said nothing, then walked back to his desk and put his head down. He sat there, stunned, until finally he looked up and said, “The president has been shot in Dallas.”
Moments later the phone rang again, and the teacher walked slowly back to answer it, and was informed that Kennedy was dead. Clinton would never forget the look on his teacher’s face when he returned that second time. “He was totally ashen-faced. I had never seen such a desolate look on a man’s face.” Jamison looked over at his friend, the budding politician who only four months before had enjoyed the thrill of his life when he shook Kennedy’s hand in the Rose Garden. “He was motionless. Not even a twitch on his face. Yet you could feel the anger building up inside him.”
In the weeks after the assassination, Bill Clinton was in great demand at the club luncheons around town. His speech to the Civitan Club on December 3 focused on his memories as one of the last people in Hot Springs to see JFK alive. The handshake on that July morning in 1963 had begun its transformation—from personal exploit to community myth.
WITH his real father long dead, his stepfather diminished, his political hero slain, Clinton was eager for a father figure. Band teacher Virgil Spurlin came closest to filling that role. Spurlin was a big, warm-hearted man, an ex-Marine and Baptist deacon who created an extended family out of his group of musical disciples. The band room was on the side of the field house behind the school, and many students treated it as their separate world, hanging out there before and after school and between classes. John Hilliard, one of Clinton’s schoolmates, who played the trumpet and later became a composer, thought of the band room as “almost like a hideaway. It was even kind of underground. It was the home spot for all of us. It had a warm atmosphere. We’d leave the band room to venture out.”
The culture in most American towns revolved around high school athlet-ics. In Hot Springs, music competed with sports for top billing. The Trojan football team was often hapless—at pep rallies, students mockingly practiced their most common cheer, “Block that kick!”—but the band and chorus brought home medals every year. The chorus was a massive Wagnerian throng of more than four hundred. And band was something that Hot Springs children prepared for from an early age. A special band teacher worked in all eight elementary schools, roaming from school to school during the week and bringing the citywide group of elementary school musicians together every Saturday. They played in the Christmas parade each winter and in the Miss Arkansas pageant parade held in Hot Springs each summer, one of the town’s favorite events where beauty contestants glided through the shaded streets in convertibles donated by Clinton Buick.
Clinton took up the tenor saxophone. He practiced every night, using it to fill up the lonely, uncertain hours of childhood. He had always hated to be alone, and playing the sax was one of the few ways he could tolerate it. Within a troubled home, Clinton once said, the saxophone gave him “the opportunity to create something that was beautiful, something that I could channel my sensitivity, my feelings into.” And it taught him that it took work and discipline to turn his jumble of feelings into notes that were clear and melodic. Every summer he went up to band camp in Fayetteville. By the time he arrived in high school, he was the best saxophone player in the city and soon would compete as the best in the state. Often at night he would go next door to Carolyn Yeldell’s to rehearse for contests: she would accompany him on piano. He toted his saxophone around as a prized possession. For Christmas during his junior year, his mother bought him a new case, but on the first day back at school Carolyn dropped it as she was getting out of his car, bending the handle in a way that could not be fixed. Clinton yelled at her with an intensity that made her realize how important that instrument was to him.
At Hot Springs High, Virgil Spurlin saw in young Clinton something more valuable than a proficient sight reader and deft improviser; he saw a natural leader who could help him keep the group in order during the year and serve as a lieutenant when Hot Springs hosted the statewide band festival each spring. There were three top student positions in the band: student director, drum major, and band major. The band major was the teacher’s administrative assistant. It was the perfect assignment for a young politician. The logistics that went into the state band festival were as intricate as plotting out a season’s schedule for major league baseball, a mathematical equation that required patience and precision. Thousands of students representing 140 bands around the state would descend on Hot Springs for three days in April. All played in a wide variety of judged venues—solos, accompanied solos, ensembles, sight-reading, marching bands, orchestras. Spurlin, the band director at the host high school, was responsible for putting it all together: hiring scores of judges from out of state and finding rooms for them at the Arlington Hotel, renting forty pianos, and arranging the thousands of performances.
After the schools sent in lists of their performers, Spurlin would take out three-foot poster boards, staple several together, and tack them to a wall. Then he and Bill Clinton would start drawing grids and filling in the names, places, and judges. They would start with one school and carry it all the way across the board, from marching band to solos, then move on to the next. The schedule called for ten performances an hour, one every six minutes. Each band director was given a pocket-sized timetable, a miniature version of the poster board schedule, and was held responsible for making sure his students were at the right place at the right time, not an easy task, since competitions were staged not only at Hot Springs High but also at music stores downtown and at private studios. While competing in the festival themselves, Clinton and his classmates recorded the results on a huge board in the band room and served as escorts and runners.
In a cosmopolitan resort town with big bands featured in all the top hotels and nightclubs, it was no embarrassment to play tenor sax for the award-winning high school dance band, the Stardusters; or to lead the Pep Band with its white overall uniforms during basketball season, pounding out the driving, sexy theme to “Peter Gunn” or to form a jazz trio known as the Kingsmen and play Dave Brubeck riffs in the auditorium during the lunch hour, wearing dark shades so that the other kids called you the Three Blind Mice. Billy Clinton did those things, and while he was not as smooth and popular in the highest circles as Jim French, the football quarterback, he had a sexual aura of his own. One family picture of him that year captures his playful persona: Billy in his living room, bedecked in his band major coat weighted with medals, but below that wearing shorts, white socks, and black low-top tennis shoes, holding a putter and crouched over a golf ball on the rug.
Although the teachers looked upon him as a model youth, Billy Clinton and his compatriots in the band were more like fraternity brothers who knew how to impress elders with their manners and then have a good time out of view. John Milliard, the trumpeter, a
year behind Clinton, roomed with Clinton and four other seniors on his first overnight trip to Blytheville. Hilliard, who thought of himself as a “goody two-shoes,” stayed in the motel room while Clinton and his pals were out past midnight and came back in a rowdy mood. On another trip when the band was at a festival at Robinson Auditorium in Little Rock, Clinton was leading a gang of boys up the stairs when they encountered some girls going down. He pulled out his hotel room key and said, “Here it is, girls! Room 157. See you later!”
Carolyn Yeldell, who watched Billy from the parsonage next door to his Scully Street house, and had a crush on him, thought that he was always finding a new girl through music. “He’d go to band camp in Fayetteville and there’d be this sort of be-still-my-beating-heart if he saw a good-looking clarinetist. Bill always had this sense about him that he collected girls. Like the Ricky Nelson song, he had a girl in every band. He had the eye for girls everywhere. He had global vision even then.” They had vision for him as well. Yeldell noticed that when her girlfriends visited her, they parked their cars near the hedge that separated her house from Clinton’s so that if he looked out his picture window he could see them.
The band culture played to Clinton’s personality. He never wanted to be alone. He enjoyed working a crowd, whether old friends or new. He made many close friends in high school, but he seemed more comfortable in crowds. It seemed to Carolyn that he would “make crowds happen. He had a psychological drive for it, a need for happy and nonconfrontational associations.” When the action was too slow moving, even if people were around, he might simply tune out. Sometimes when David Leopoulos was over at the house on a rainy day, when they were sitting in the dining room playing a game, he would look over at Clinton and realize that he was somewhere far away. He would talk, Leopoulos later said, and Clinton would not hear a word he said.
GRADUATION for the Hot Springs High class of 1964 was a week-long extravaganza. It began with a commencement sermon by Carolyn Yeldell’s father, the Reverend Walter Yeldell, at his Second Baptist Church. His sermon was entitled “Missing One’s Destiny.” A “Silver Tea” was held the next day at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Don Dierks, a timber family whose son Joe was elected student council president after Billy Clinton and Phil Jamison could not run. The house was festooned in red and white, from the bunting to the mints. Seniors were escorted inside to a receiving line of parents, class officers, and school officials, and served tea and cake. Mrs. Mackey was there that night, and at one point gathered a group around her, Billy Clinton and Joe Dierks and David Leopoulos and Phil Jamison and Carolyn Yeldell and a few others. The stern and upright principal’s face softened as she spoke. “I’ve never said this to anyone before, but there is something special about the class of ′64,” she said. “This is going to be a very great class. It’s going to accomplish a lot.”
The class picnic was held at Lake Hamilton, followed by Senior Assembly Day in the auditorium. Seniors walked around the halls of the old school getting their Old Gold Yearbooks signed for the last time. Clinton was in the book nearly thirty times “Billy, I am honored to have known a gentleman who has courage, ambition and determination,” his guidance coun-selor, Edith Irons, wrote in his book. “God has richly blessed you. I know in a few years I shall ‘read’ about you—please don’t get too ‘big and busy’ to drop by and see your old counselor.” When friends and teachers handed him their yearbooks, he often turned to the page with the picture of him shaking hands with President Kennedy and signed below the photograph. His longest message, and his most humble, was to the band director, Virgil Spurlin:
Dear Mr. Spurlin,
Ever since before I could play the C scale—I’ve been overwhelmed in the presence of your huge hulk of manhood. I know of no finer man anywhere, and I’ve been fortunate enough to meet many. You’ve had such a great effect on me—I’ll never be able to say what I feel … how much I love and respect you and how much I appreciate everything you’ve done for me. I honestly tried to do a good job for you, I think I almost made it. Now it’s time for me to leave and make the best I can of myself, and I know that no matter how I do, I’ll be better because of my association with one of the great Christian men that the Lord ever gave life.
God Bless you,
Bill Clinton
The class banquet was held May 28, and the next day, finally, came the seventy-eighth annual commencement at Hot Springs High School. Clinton and several of his friends spent the afternoon climbing magnolia trees near the school to cut blossoms that they scattered around the grass at Rix Field, where the ceremonies would be held that night. The skies turned dark gray and it rained before the eight o’clock exercises began, but the seniors voted to keep the ceremony outside. After the processional, band members tried to keep their instruments dry under the grandstands, where the rainfall was so heavy that a few drums ended up floating in water. In the class of 363, there were 50 honors graduates who wore gold tassels. The caps and gowns were light gray. They entered the stadium from both ends along a fence decorated with red and white satin ribbons. There were three student speakers: Letha Ann Wooldridge, the valedictorian; Ricky Lee Silverman, the salutatorian; and William Jefferson Clinton, whose grades placed him fourth in the class. He had the last word: the benediction. Part prayer, it became the first political speech he gave to a sizable audience:
Dear Lord, as we leave this place and this era of our lives, we ask your blessing on us while we stand together for the last time as the Hot Springs High School class of 1964. Our high school days are no more. Now we must prepare to live only by the guide of our own faith and character. We pray to keep a high sense of values while wandering through the complex maze which is our society. Direct us to know and care what is right and wrong, so that we will be victorious in this life and rewarded in the next. Lord give us the strength to do these things. Leave within us the youthful idealism and moralism which have made our people strong. Sicken us at the sight of apathy, ignorance and rejection so that our generation will remove complacency, poverty and prejudice from the hearts of free men.
And Lord, once more, make us care so that we will never know the misery and muddle of a life without purpose, and so that when we die, others will still have the opportunity to live in a free land. Take our hands, Dear God, and lead us from this place, into the future, into Eternity, and we will be together again. Amen.
At home on Scully Street that weekend, Virginia Clinton wrote a note to her mother. Edith Cassidy was in many ways Billy’s first mother, the one who took care of him for two years as a toddler while Virginia, the young widow, was in New Orleans learning her trade. It was Mammaw who first thought Billy was special, who taught him how to read before he turned three. The two women had competed for his love and respect ever since, but now they could share in his growing success. Virginia wrote her mother a letter bursting with pride in the boy they sometimes called “Bubba.”
“Dear Mother,” she wrote “Here are some of the clippings and activities of Bubba lately. I typed out the beautiful prayer that Bill wrote and recited at the place of graduation. His voice was magnificent as it sounded over the microphone in the football stadium. Of course, I was so proud of him I nearly died. He was truly in all his glory that night.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE ROAD AHEAD
THERE WAS NO shortage of useful advice offered to freshmen entering Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in the fall of 1964. The head of the orientation committee enlightened the newcomers on the grading quirks of various professors and pointed out the favored pubs in a city where eighteen-year-olds were allowed to drink beer. The Jesuit fathers warned them of curfews and dress codes: in the rooms by eight-thirty, with only a half-hour break for snacks and socializing before lights out at eleven from Sunday through Thursday. Coats and ties required in class and at the dining hall. No females in the dorm. No public displays of affection, known as PDAs. A columnist for the school magazine, The Courier, placed those rules in the context of admin
istration hypocrisy: “Remember, at Georgetown you will be addressed as ‘Gentlemen’ and treated as children.” Another writer offered a sardonic guide to conformist behav-ior: “The basic rule for survival on campus is to be tough, think tough, act tough. Wear tight chinos to prove your masculinity; wear madras shirts and shoes without socks, just like the 50 guys standing outside the 1789 to prove you can look exactly like another 50, or 500, or 5,000 Happy Hoyas.”
Georgetown in that era was divided into two distinct worlds. The college of arts and sciences, known as the Yard, was all-male and 96 percent Catholic, a homogeneous bundling of parochial school boys from the East Coast who were the quintessential Happy Hoyas. The School of Foreign Service was part of what was known as the East Campus (a few blocks east of the Yard), a consortium that also included the School of Business Administration and the Institute of Languages and Linguistics. The East Campus was a diverse melting pot compared with the Yard: there were women around, first of all, most of them in languages, but 148 in foreign service and a handful in business. The East Campus also enrolled scores of wealthy foreign students: the sons and daughters of ruling elites, including a band of polo-playing Cuban exiles who wore their coats like capes, inhaled nonfilter cigarettes, cruised the Hilltop in their convertible sports cars, and got most of the glamorous girls. The School of Foreign Service was the least Catholic part of Georgetown, almost evenly divided between parochial and public school graduates and including a few hundred Protestants and forty-one Jewish students.
Bill Clinton matched none of the Hoya profiles when he arrived at the East Campus for freshman orientation. Going sockless was a bit advanced for someone just making the transition from white socks to dark ones. He might decide to follow the crowds to the campus pubs, but once inside he would guzzle soft drinks or water, not beer: his family turmoil scared him away from alcohol, which he considered a dangerous indulgence. As diverse as the School of Foreign Service was compared to the rest of the university, a drawling Arkansan apparently was enough of an oddity that when Clinton stopped by the administration office on the first day, the freshman dean mused aloud whether Georgetown had made a mistake admitting a Southern Baptist whose only foreign language was Latin. Clinton knew it was no mistake: Georgetown was the only school he had applied to during his senior year in Hot Springs, after hearing about it from his guidance counselor, Edith Irons. He wanted to be in Washington, near the center of politics. As he walked out of the admissions office with his mother, he assured her that the dean’s sarcasm would soon be overtaken. “Don’t worry, Mother,” he told her. “By the time I leave here they’ll know why they let me in.”
First In His Class Page 6
