First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Clinton’s roommate reached Room 225 Loyola Hall while Bill and his mother were out. Tom Campbell was more nearly the Hoya prototype, an Irish Catholic boy from Long Island who had attended a Jesuit military high school. He had driven to Washington with his father, a conservative judge, and when he got to the dorm and saw his roommate’s name, he worried about how his old man would react to his sharing a room with a black classmate. Campbell, who had never associated with black people or Southern Baptists, assumed that his roommate was black because of the name: William Jefferson Clinton. His father was helping him unpack when Bill and Virginia returned and overwhelmed the Long Islanders with southern charm. The moment they walked through the doorway, they immediately made the place theirs. As a pair, Campbell said later, “they just filled the room.”

  Loyola Hall had once been a hospital wing, an aging brick building with a scattered assortment of single, double, and even four-bedded rooms that were assigned in alphabetical order. Most boys on the second floor had last names beginning with C, a few with B or D. John Dagnon of New Castle, Pennsylvania, had the biggest room across the hall from Clinton and Campbell, and he hosted a corridor meeting on that first night. There was inevitable posturing and politicking as the freshmen went through the ritual of establishing a pecking order. At the start of the evening, the group seemed to revolve around Dagnon and an urbane, witty midwesterner who let it be known that he was heir to a life insurance fortune. But it did not take long for Clinton to become a dominant force, sticking out his over-sized right hand, asking his classmates where they were from, what they were interested in, then working the conversation around to his roots, the giant watermelons grown in Hope, Arkansas, and inquiring, gently, as to whether they had given thought to running for any student office.

  Although many of the boys tried to play it cool, Clinton showed little reserve. He was eager and friendly. There was something about him that left the more refined budding Hoyas puzzled. Here they were, ready to start anew, shedding their past lives, and there was Clinton boasting about where he came from and using his background as the setting for self-effacing jokes. Thomas Mark Caplan, a jeweler’s son from Baltimore, thought that Clinton “stood out immediately for his sense and evocation of place. He was not from homogenized, suburban America.” Only later would some friends appreciate that Clinton used Arkansas as a foil for his vulnerability.

  Clinton adjusted quickly to his surroundings. While another southern freshman at Loyola Hall, Kit Ashby of Dallas, struggled with his identity, hauling out a book his mother had sent him—What Presbyterians Believe—so that he could argue with his Catholic hallmates about the Trinity and original sin, Clinton felt comfortable enough with his Baptist heritage that he could worship among the Catholics at the campus chapel. He bought stationery with the Georgetown seal and postcards depicting the Gothic spires, and sent a passel of letters and notes to old friends and relatives. To his grandmother, Edith Cassidy, in Hope, he wrote: “Dear Mammaw, I love it here. It is very beautiful…. My roommate is a very nice boy from New York. We’re going to have to study very hard. But it will be worth it. Love, Billy.”

  He and roommate Campbell turned out to be a harmonious pairing. They were moderate in behavior; no all-night drinking binges in Room 225. Campbell was a straight-shooter, no hard edges, no fakery, solicitous of Clinton in all things political, yet good-naturedly alert to his ambitions and foibles. Clinton tried to assist Campbell with his classwork, and Campbell tried to teach Clinton how to march straight after they signed up for the optional Air Force ROTC program that met every Tuesday morning at quarter to eight for an hour of drilling. (Neither effort was very effective. Campbell struggled with his classes, and Clinton, in Campbell’s opinion, “just didn’t look good in a uniform, and despite having been in a band, he simply could not figure out left face from about face.”) With his military school background, Campbell was fairly neat, and Clinton obliged on his side of the room, keeping his laundry off the brown linoleum floor. They enjoyed much of the same music: Dave Brubeck, Nancy Wilson, Glen Yarborough. The southern boy’s teenage obsession with Elvis Presley was in temporary recession. Clinton brought an old pop-down phonograph with him from Hot Springs, which Campbell enjoyed, and an oversized wind-up alarm clock, which drove him crazy.

  The alarm clock—“this god-awful ticking alarm clock,” Campbell called it—seemed to get louder every night. Soon it came to symbolize their differing attitudes toward time and achievement. Campbell had bent to enough discipline in his life, imposed by father and school, and was enjoying the relative freedom of the university. He worried little about apportioning his time and less about studying. Clinton’s discipline had been largely self-imposed. From his early years he had tried to fit more hours into a day, and now as his aspirations grew, so did his need to find more time to realize them. The freshman year was only a few weeks old when his Development of Civilization professor, Carroll Quigley, inspired him to make his days even longer. In a lecture on great men, Quigley noted that many of them required less sleep than other mortals. The greatest leaders, he said, often slept no more than five hours and refreshed themselves during the day with brief catnaps. Clinton returned to the dorm room after that morning lecture and immediately set his alarm clock for a twenty-minute nap. And he began sleeping five hours a night, the big clock resounding with the urgency of his mission.

  CLINTON needed to walk no further than three doors down the hall to be reminded of his vision of greatness. Tommy Caplan was an ebullient fellow more interested in literature than politics, yet his connection to John F. Kennedy made Clinton’s handshake with his hero seem trivial. Clinton told his grandmother about his floormate. “One thing I really want to do is go see President Kennedy’s grave,” he wrote. “There is a boy down the hall from me who worked for Kennedy in the White House. He knows all the Kennedy family and John Kennedy Jr. is supposed to visit him at Georgetown sometime this year. He is only three years old, but this boy says he is a really smart boy and just like his daddy.”

  Tommy Caplan had met Kennedy in 1960, when the Massachusetts senator was campaigning for president and Caplan was an eighth-grade reporter for his school newspaper in Baltimore. Of all the prospective presidential candidates in both parties, Kennedy had been the only one to respond affirmatively to young Caplan’s request for an interview, and they had met briefly during Kennedy’s visit to Baltimore before the Maryland primary in May. That summer, Caplan had organized the Teen Democrats of Maryland, volunteering at the Democratic party offices in the old Emerson Hotel in downtown Baltimore and occasionally running errands, by train, to the national headquarters in Washington.

  After Kennedy reached the White House, Caplan, by then a sophomore at Gilman, an Episcopal prep school in Baltimore, developed the idea of creating a junior peace corps, in which teenagers from the United States would correspond with their contemporaries in developing countries. He began a lobbying campaign for his idea, telephoning and writing officials inside the White House, until eventually Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s special assistant and speechwriter, Evelyn Lincoln, his personal secretary, and Robert Kennedy, the U.S. Attorney General, all responded. By 1963, the Youth-to-Youth pilot project was a reality and Caplan spent much of the summer commuting to Washington, recruiting young Americans to join his program and acquiring the names of foreign students through the United States Information Agency. Caplan was also a regular and welcome visitor at the White House, often loitering at Mrs. Lincoln’s desk until the president appeared.

  One year after Kennedy’s assassination, Georgetown was still in the Camelot shadow. Ads in The Hoya honored JFK as the “ideal embodiment of noblest manhood of our time.” The Jesuit school announced plans to honor the nation’s first Catholic president with a posthumous honorary degree at Georgetown’s 175th anniversary program, and Robert F. Kennedy had agreed to accept it. There was a feeling too that Lyndon Johnson, as different as he was from Kennedy, was nonetheless his legitimate inheri-tor, carrying forward and
even expanding Kennedy’s sense of optimism. Johnson had pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, whose public accommodations provisions signaled a massive federal assault on racial segregation in America. He had also persuaded Congress, including Clinton’s home-state role model, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright, to approve the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that laid the legislative groundwork for further intervention in Vietnam, but few among the students realized how the Vietnam War would cloud their futures. In that fall of 1964 there was a sense of great progress.

  It was in that effervescent environment that the two Kennedy worship-ers, Caplan and Clinton, became sidekicks. One day Caplan took Clinton over to the National Archives, where Kennedy’s former secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, was cataloguing the late president’s personal effects for future display. Mrs. Lincoln showed them Kennedy’s famous rocking chair, and his desks, and in an annex behind her office, they walked down row after row of metal stacks holding the artifacts of JFK’s life. Caplan had seen some of these very items when he was padding around the Kennedy White House. Now he would become the backstage adviser to a Kennedy acolyte.

  Clinton had lost two elections in a row—to Jack Hanks, Jr., of Texas for the Nationalist party vice-presidential nomination at Boys Nation, and to Carolyn Yeldell for senior class secretary at Hot Springs High. In both cases he had run for offices below his aspirations and therefore had done so halfheartedly. Now he would run as hard as he could. Within a few days of settling in Room 225 he had been off and running for president of the freshman class. Campbell helped him distribute leaflets and Caplan advised him on speeches, but Clinton ran his own show. His candidacy was non-ideological, and he developed a platform of dry moderation. He called for better communications through a campus government newsletter and referendum powers for the student body. “I believe this is a possible plat-form,” he assured potential voters. “The feasibility of every plank has been carefully examined.”

  Every voting bloc in the East Campus electorate was carefully examined as well. In surveying the political landscape, Clinton learned that student politicians from Long Island tended to dominate. Another Long Island power play was taking shape, with a slate of freshman candidates that included Glen Pallen of Garden City for president, Judi Baiocchi of Manhasset for secretary, and Paul Maloy of Manhasset for treasurer. Campbell could help Clinton cut into Pallen’s Long Island vote. Clinton saw great potential support among the women at the language institute, especially after he talked one of them out of running against him. He mimeographed his platform and signed copies by hand while eating breakfast. And then he set out to meet every voter on the East Campus. John Dagnon across the hall, another non—Long Islander, was running for treasurer against Maloy, and formed an informal alliance with Clinton, accompanying him around the dorms at night, going door to door. On the way back they would pay respects to the Second Loyola prefect, a graduate student who encouraged their political efforts.

  The nominations were officially posted October 23 in the Palms Lounge of the Walsh Building, where Clinton and his opponents had brought in their own cheering sections replete with guitars, a trombone, and even an English horn. Clinton and Pallen delivered back-to-back speeches. Clinton’s performance was lost to history, but Pallen’s address was unforgettable. He delivered an overwrought oration written by his hallmate, David Matter, burdened with world-is-ending rhetoric, warning that society was falling into “a bottomless abyss of perdition.” No one in the room knew what got into Pallen or what he was talking about. Matter thought he had written something profound until he noticed all the snickering. From then on, all Matter or Clinton had to do to produce a laugh was to evoke the “bottomless abyss of perdition.”

  On Halloween Eve, Clinton was elected president of the freshman class. He took office with a phalanx of Long Islanders, who were somewhat surprised to find him in their midst. “Bill Clinton—who looks and sounds like an amiable farm boy, is the latest to ascend to that position of status supremacy known as freshman class president,” the next issue of The Courier proclaimed. If anyone on campus was thirsting for bold action from the new student leader, they would be disappointed. “The freshman year is not the time for crusading, but the building of a strong unit for the future,” Clinton told the student magazine. “You must know the rules before you can change them.”

  Clinton copied the stories about his victory and sent them to his mother in Hot Springs and his grandmother in Hope. Virginia Clinton had followed the campaign closely, writing her son every two or three days with news from home and getting back about one letter and one phone call per week. On the evening of Saturday, November 8, he sat at his desk in Room 225 and wrote a short note to his mammaw, explaining that his birthday greeting to her was late because of the election contest:

  I know I’m late, but I’ve had so much to do lately, as the article will show. I’m staying home tonight and trying to study. Next week our class has to build a float for the football homecoming and I have lots of tests. I’m making pretty good grades so far, all A’s and B’s except for English. I’ve got a C, but so does everyone else in the class. I’ll just keep working and hope to bring the grade up. Must study … love you, Billy.

  SINCE its founding in 1919, the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown had maintained its own professors and courses, but in a larger sense it was shaped by the theories of education of the Jesuit founder, Ignatius Loyola, based on sequential core courses. Some of the professors were priests, some laymen, all colorful characters. Robert Irving, the English professor in whose class freshman Bill Clinton was getting a C, was a trim and caustically witty man who often lectured while seated, legs crossed beneath him, until some theme especially excited him and he would lift his body from the chair much like a gymnast working the sawhorse, then recross his legs from right over left to left over right. His students knew that he loved writing and literature, and they soon discovered that he had zero tolerance for lazy formulations. Tommy Caplan wrote an essay in which he described the emotions he felt emerging from the Capitol at night. “All these things and more go through your mind,” he wrote. The paper was returned with the phrase circled and the rejoinder—“If you are a capricious little bilge pump, that is.”

  Non-Catholic students were not required to take theology classes, but instead studied comparative cultures under Father Joseph S. Sebes, a Hun-garian-born China scholar who spoke Spanish, Italian, German, French, two dialects of Chinese, and English, all in a thick Hungarian accent. Sebes was a thin, pale aesthete, cigarette drooping from his mouth, who loved nothing more than to eat, drink, and philosophize with like-minded souls. Late in the afternoon, after his teaching was done, he would trudge up the hill from the East Campus to drink scotch and smoke a half-pack of cigarettes while unwinding in the office of a Jesuit compatriot, admissions dean Joe Sweeney. As the evening wore on, he might be found deep in conversation with students treating him to dinner upstairs at the 1789. He had arrived at Georgetown in 1958 with one kidney, saying that he came there to die; he drank and smoked as though he considered death imminent, and stayed around for another generation.

  The course Sebes taught freshmen non-Catholics in 1964 was known around campus by its nickname, “Buddhism for Baptists,” and it seemed especially designed for the young Baptist from Hot Springs. Sebes, according to one of his disciples, Father James Walsh, “devised the course to present world religions from within. When he taught Buddhism, he laid out the beliefs and practices as though he were a devout Buddhist. He taught Islam as a convinced Muslim. Taoism was second nature to him. He never said ‘they,’ but always ‘we’—‘we Hindus,’ ‘we Buddhists.’ It was sympathetic imagination—the ability to put yourself into the world view of other people.” To the extent that Sebes’s approach to learning took hold, Walsh believed, “students came away with the instinct to look at issues from various angles—that instinct eschews polarizing tendencies and values the ability to find common ground. This is not congenial
to everybody, of course. People who tend to be literal-minded might label those who try to practice it as duplicitous, even slick.”

  Otto Hentz, then a twenty-four-year-old Jesuit not yet ordained, who taught Clinton’s introductory philosophy course, picked up where Sebes left off. Hentz championed the philosophy of analogical imagination. Drawing on the work of the Jesuit theologian William Lynch, Hentz presented his students with three perspectives on the world around them: the univo-cal, where everything is clear and distinct, black and white, if you say “chair,” all it means is chair; the equivocal, where everything is differences and uncertainty; and the analogical, where clarity is found within complex-ity, not despite it. People who are analogical tend to be misunderstood by univocalists, who need to make everything absolute, Hentz would say, but the analogical thinkers more often make their way successfully through the world. He saw an analogical mind at work in the essays of eighteen-year-old Bill Clinton.