Hyland was one of six children in an easygoing, upper-middle-class Irish Catholic family from Upper Montclair, a leafy suburb in northern New Jersey. Her father was an orthopedic surgeon and her mother was a dieti-tian. She was only seventeen when she arrived at Georgetown to study French at the language institute, tall and poised, as reserved as Clinton was outgoing. As a schoolgirl she had studied maps, history books, and National Geographic magazines. Their mutual friends noticed that she had a grace about her that brought out the better side of Clinton’s nature. She was innocent, though not naive, and her unthreatening manner allowed Clinton to express his self-doubt and vulnerability. They went everywhere together. On warm spring nights they would often end up at the Capitol. They would sit on the west steps and look out at the Mall, out into the quiet darkness to the beacons of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, and talk about the nation and its problems. When he ran for sophomore class president near the end of the freshman year, Hyland helped pass out leaflets and type his platform. She organized the women in her dorm into a potent campaign operation that helped Clinton win again.
At the end of the semester she took him home to New Jersey to meet her family. He charmed the Hyland brood, wrestling in the living room with Denise’s two little brothers, teaching her little sister how to make peanut butter and banana sandwiches, chatting late into the night with her mother in the kitchen as she washed the dishes and he dried. It was as though he wanted to lose himself in this functional and secure family. Then Denise went to France for the summer and Clinton to Hot Springs. Every day he drove to Mount Pine to work as a counselor at Camp Yorktown Bay. At night he read books and wrote letters to his girlfriend in France, letters that revealed a sentimental young man.
“I meet some awfully cute kids at camp,” he wrote in his first letter to Hyland.
Some really make you realize how lucky you are. One flunked seventh grade last year and has always been in trouble…. One had his way paid by the Houston Boys Club and his mother, the mother of six more, didn’t give him a cent to take with him…. When they get back to Houston he has to call an aunt to find out where he lives. They were giving swimming tests tonight and one little scrapper tried even though he couldn’t swim a lick. When one of the counselors pulled him out he was so pale and shivering. Later I was walking with him to the gym and he told me he was really a lucky boy—his experience in the lake was nothing—he swallowed his tongue, he’d been poisoned, and been in a bad wreck. His father died three months ago. The little guy was so cute telling me how he was going to take care of his mother and sister—kinda hard though—cause they are all bigger than he. Camp is really good for these boys—good for this one too I guess.
Soon after Clinton arrived in Arkansas, his grandfather Alien W. Clinton took deathly ill. “My grandfather is dying tonight, Denise,” he wrote Hyland on June 10. “Mother and Daddy just left and all the family is beginning to congregate. He is a fine old gentleman of 85 and until two years ago he produced some of the best vegetables you ever saw in his acre garden. Worked at the garage until the very end. He was never much of a church-goer, but I have a hunch he is going to have a good trip.” Clinton had always admired people like this grandfather, uneducated Arkansans whose lives seemed simple and honest. They appealed to him almost as characters out of the Old Testament. After the funeral, Clinton wrote about him again: “He was really amazing to have lived so long—but I guess more amazing is he lived so well. He was really quite a man, especially for one who lived so simply, and the greatest in the world might have been a carpenter.”
In his letters, Clinton rarely mentioned the man he called “Daddy”—his stepfather Roger Clinton—but went on about his mother’s gardening and her carbohydrate diets and gave constant progress reports on his eight-year-old brother Roger. His care for Roger seemed almost maternal. Hyland would open the letters to discover what the boy looked like, how his shoulders were broadening, how “he weighs 90 pounds now.” Clinton’s preoccupation with his own weight was transferred to his little brother. They were eating too many sweets, he lamented: “Sometimes I think the whole house will sink into a heap of sugar.”
Time was another constant in his letters: he was always taking note of it and trying to find more of it. “It’s 1:30 a.m. and I have to get up at six.” When he could not sleep at night, he said, he would turn on the light and read. One night he woke up at three-thirty and read until five. “I wish I could wake up and read in the middle of every night.”
His reading interests ranged from the dense and furious southern prose of William Faulkner to the corny poetry of Edgar Guest, which he described to Hyland as “very simple, kinda southern, kinda negro, very beautiful poetry.” Guest was neither southern nor black. He was a London-born journalist whose homespun verse for the Detroit Free Press was syndicated to an adoring national audience. But when Clinton read Guest’s work he thought it was written expressly for his idealized vision of his childhood in Hope and Hot Springs, not the private torment that alcohol visited upon his family but the sheltering of his mammaw and pappaw in Hope and the free and easy days roaming the streets of Hot Springs with his adolescent friends. “David Leopoulos and I agreed today—no one ever enjoyed being kids more than we did—it would be pretty hard to crowd more living in,” he wrote.
Nothing pleased Clinton more than to show off his homeland to friends from other places. His first visitor was Tom Campbell, who came down from Long Island for a week that summer. Campbell arrived in Little Rock late at night and was struck first by its smallness. “I remember the black-ness,” he recalled. “On the East Coast, it was all lights. Out there it was blackness, lights, blackness again. The whole feeling was something I’d never experienced before. It was exotic: the heavy southern air, the warmth, the darkness. I felt like I was in another country on the drive from Little Rock to Hot Springs.” They goofed around with Leopoulos, shot baskets in the driveway, went water-skiing out at Uncle Raymond’s place on Lake Hamilton, and had a little party on Scully Street.
Carolyn Yeldell was home that summer from Ouachita Baptist University. She had read Emily Post, and “learned the whole business of entertain-ing,” preparing for a future where she might be the wife of a politician. She and Clinton went to the grocery store and bought crackers, cheese spreads, vegetables, and sodas. When she got home with the party food, her mother was upset that she had used her hard-earned money, money that was supposed to go toward a tonsils operation, for a party next door. “Who do you think you are,” she snapped at Carolyn, “Mrs. Astor?” Carolyn “cried and cried,” she later remembered. “I was making my mark as an entertainer or practice bride. I wanted to be the perfect hostess. That I would spend my money on it horrified my parents. I don’t remember Bill chipping any money in. But I remember Roger Clinton, Sr., was impressed. He said, ‘You are going to make some man so lucky.’”
When his roommate went back to Long Island, Clinton began concentrating on the year ahead. He had already been elected sophomore class president, and he drafted plans for an orientation committee that would greet every freshman at the Main Gate and help them move into their dorms. He also began plotting his future beyond that. “What feedback are you getting from the French regarding Vietnam?” he asked Hyland in an August letter. Then he added: “I’ve been meaning to ask you, does the Institute of Language and Linguistics offer a course in Vietnamese? I really want to know. If I go to summer school next summer, I can take it in my junior year. Someone has to be there after—and during—the war to speak and help the people—probably not over one or two people in our embassy can converse fluently. Let’s hope there’ll come a time when guns won’t have to win our battles for us and we can begin to win battles in the cold war again.” Hyland wrote back that she was uncertain about the language question but could tell him that there was “a real negative feeling about America” since the Johnson administration had escalated the war.
From his letters that summer it was clear that Clinton was struggl
ing with the competing impulses of humility and ambition. He was looking wistfully at his past, seeing it only in its innocence. And of his future, he wrote: “Just searching, I guess, for a road ahead. Maybe I am beginning to realize that I am almost grown, and will soon have to choose that one final motive in life which I hope will put a little asterisk by my name in the billion pages of the book of life.”
Denise Hyland sensed what that little asterisk might denote. When she reached Nice after studying in Dijon, she met a group of college students from France and America, including some Texans. “This one tall proud Texas boy was talking on and on about his political future,” Hyland later recalled. “And I turned to him and I said, ‘Remember this name—Bill Clintonbec—ause someday he will be president.’”
CHAPTER FOUR
HE WAS ON FIRE
FOR THE START of his sophomore year at Georgetown, Clinton made the return trip east by car, the first time that he had covered the distance on the ground. Kit Ashby, his classmate from Dallas, came up to Hot Springs and joined him for the 1,200-mile drive. Their plan was to go nonstop, four hours on, four hours off for each driver; but in those days before the completion of the East-West interstate system, the journey was an arduous succession of narrow twists and turns. Ashby was shocked and awed by “how many miles, how many hours, how much land” there was between where they grew up and where they went to school. He was at the wheel as they drove through the hills of Tennessee, and he saw, for the first time in his life, the makeshift memorials to accident victims that were becoming commonplace along American highways: seven white wooden crosses lined the embankment as he negotiated the sharpest bends in the road. Clinton understood all too well the real-life consequences of those symbolic markers: a highway in southern Missouri had taken away the father he never knew. In the middle of the night, overtaken by drowsiness, they pulled over at a rest stop in Virginia and slept for a few hours. They drove across the Potomac and up to Georgetown the next day, two college boys on top of the world, big men on campus, Clinton possessing everything he might want at nineteen: the white Buick convertible with its red interior, the affection of Denise Hyland, and the presidency of the sophomore class.
As the student officer responsible for making the incoming freshmen feel welcome, Clinton had the opportunity to make new friends and build his constituency at the same time. He seemed to be everywhere at once: at the Main Gate shaking hands with anxious parents and students as they pulled up; at Loyola Hall, hauling luggage up the stairs. No one knew how to navigate the campus more skillfully. As polished as Clinton had become at Georgetown politics, appealing to students by calling for lower cafeteria prices and to Jesuit administrators by stressing student moderation and civility, he was even more adept in the classroom, where it seemed that he studied the teachers with as much diligence as he applied to the subject matter. His coziness with professors was a source of constant razzing from his friends. Tom Campbell, once again his roommate, this time in Harbin Hall, would tease Clinton by placing his hand on his nose in an obscene gesture and saying, “Bill, you’ve got your nose up their ass all the time.” Clinton would deny it, claiming that he was “trying to clear up an inconsis-tency.” But Campbell knew better. He marveled at how Clinton could figure out what was important to a professor and pick his brain, raising points of special interest to the teacher. Clinton was doing what came naturally to him, Campbell concluded. He was working the room.
Although Campbell, Moore, and Ashby chided Clinton about his solicitous approach to teachers, they also had enough sense to try to get into classes with him and pick his brain in study groups. Clinton’s ability to anticipate test questions by studying the professors was what set him apart from the rest of them, Ashby believed. A medical student had once told Ashby that the great doctors were not those most interested in helping people but those who were most fascinated by the human body and how it works. “Bill had that same intense fascination with people and how they work. That was the thrust of his intellectual curiosity.”
That curiosity was put to full use in the most exacting course in the sophomore curriculum, U.S. Constitution and Law, taught by Walter I. Giles. The course was modeled after a law school seminar. Undergraduates formed study groups to survive, parceling out the heavy reading load. Clinton was in a study group with Moore and Ashby. When they gathered to go over law cases, the others were struck by Clinton’s clarity and sense of humor about coursework that could otherwise seem intimidating. He would tell stories to relax the others, and “better than anyone I had seen,” Moore observed, “he could absorb a lot of information and come right to the point.” He was a meticulous notetaker. John Spotila, a freshman friend, missed classes one week and borrowed Clinton’s notes. Clinton had not only outlined with Roman numerals and subheadings, but cross-referenced the material. From then on, Spotila copied Clinton’s notebook every day.
The Giles course, much like Quigley’s, was one of the shared experiences of School of Foreign Service students. Some agreed with Phil Verveer’s description of Walter Giles as a “somewhat imperious character.” He was definitely a man of traditions. All classroom exchanges were conducted formally as “Mister” and “Sir,” and students stood when answering questions. It was highly embarrassing to be called upon and not have an answer; the only way to avert that humiliation was to come to Giles before class started and plead nolo contendere. What Giles imparted to his disciples was respect for the founding documents of American law and their application in the twentieth century. He had a liberal outlook toward human rights, an expansive interpretation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and what Tommy Caplan regarded as “a great sense of the genius of our founding fathers and of the majesty of their document.”
The Warren Court was in its heyday then, interpreting civil liberties and civil rights in ways that Giles generally favored. Landmark cases emerging from the Warren Court would quickly become part of Giles’s course, providing new material for his rigorous exams. Two weeks before each test, he would distribute a syllabus of cases and readings that his students should be familiar with in order to handle the essay questions. Everything that was going to be on the exam would be somewhere in that stapled syllabus, but there was so much that it was virtually impossible to read it all. Clinton, knowing how to read the professor, knew how to read the syllabus, and the study group the week before an exam would focus intently on what Clinton picked out as the essential material. Although his exams were difficult, Giles stressed that they were the least important part of his class. It was the learning process that he loved. On the first page of every syllabus, Giles would present his philosophy of learning, a quotation from Justice Benjamin Cardozo: “In the end the great truth will have been learned, that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer than the prize, or rather that the effort is the prize, the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.”
Giles lived near campus in a carriage house with a felicitous history: it was originally part of the estate of the Marbury who lent his name to the landmark 1803 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Marbury v. Madison, which established the judicial branch’s right to review the constitutionality of legislation. It seemed to David Kammer that Giles “was wedded to the institution” of teaching, much in the manner of an Oxford don. He socialized with students outside the classroom, especially during football season. Football Sundays were a Giles ritual. He held four tickets for Washington Redskins home games and would invite students to accompany him. Clinton was among those invited, though he was of no help downing the cooler full of martinis that the professor and his brood toted into D.C. Stadium. For away games, Giles invited a group of six or eight who gathered at his carriage house and watched the game on television while downing Heinekens, martinis, and Bloody Marys, and sharing his Triscuits topped with Cheddar cheese and bacon. It was partly a performance, and those who performed well would find a second invitation in their mailbox.
Those who stood out in class and
at the carriage house were tapped for a peculiar and colorful drama. It was called the James Madison Martini Lecture. Giles would walk into class that day and open a portable bar— Tanqueray gin, Martini & Rossi, olives—and launch into a discourse on the role of olives in American constitutional history. As he spoke, he would mix a pitcher of martinis. As the lecture concluded, he would call a group of students up to the front, hand each a martini glass, and propose a toast. “Gentlemen, to the republic!” They would toss down their martinis and the glasses would be filled again, followed by a second Giles toast: “Gentle-men, may confusion reign among enemies of the republic!” Confusion certainly reigned in the heads of the classroom leaders as they stumbled out in a two-martini daze.
Clinton thrived in this environment without being a drinker or much of a Redskins fan. He was, in the football realm as most everything else, still an Arkansas chauvinist. His high school friend Phil Jamison, who had transferred from Texas A&M to the Naval Academy that year, came to Washington on October 16 to attend Navy’s contest against Pitt, and after the game he and two fellow plebes from Arkansas made their way up to the Georgetown campus to spend the afternoon and evening. Clinton took them over to the lounge in Denise Hyland’s dorm where they watched Arkansas beat Texas in a Southwest Conference showdown, 27-24. The women of Georgetown had never witnessed anything quite like that late afternoon when Clinton and his buddies filled the dorm lobby with ear-splitting howls of “Whooo-pig-sooey!” That night, Clinton and Denise got Jamison and his friends dates for the dance at McDonough Gym featuring the Four Tops.
That was Bill Clinton at Georgetown, a curious mix, calling the hogs in support of an all-white college football team one hour, singing the lyrics to the soulful Motown tunes of the Four Tops the next. He was of both worlds. The progressive Clinton would make the case for the Johnson civil rights initiatives. The traditional Clinton revered his southern roots and the people back home so much that he tried to shy away from confrontations on issues of race. When his grandmother mailed him a pouch of postcards from Hope with an overtly racist image, a Sambo-styled black boy polishing enormous watermelons, Clinton mailed one back to her with the message: “Dear Mammaw, Thought I would send you one of your cards just to prove I’m using them.”
First In His Class Page 9
