First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  It was of no use in the endcash—not the money, not the sixteen visits that McGovern and Shriver paid to the state, not the talents of Clinton and Branch. On November 7, Nixon crushed McGovern in Texas, winning 67 percent of the vote on his way to one of the most lopsided victories in American presidential history.

  A few days after the election, Clinton and Branch and the rest of the Sixth Street gang drove out to Bob Armstrong’s ranch near Liberty Hill on the outskirts of Austin and spent one long last evening together. They played touch football and sat around a campfire and sang to the accompaniment of Armstrong’s guitar. Clinton crooned a few Elvis tunes and Branch sang “Rocky Raccoon.” Most of the people there, according to Mark Bsumenthal, were in “altered states of consciousness induced by the heavy disappointment that we lost so badly.” Bottles of Jack Daniel’s were passed around the campfire along with “a couple of joints.”

  Each one had a different way of dealing with loss. Franklin Garcia told Branch that he seemed to be in serious emotional distress. “You need to go hunting,” Garcia told him. “Shoot a bird so that you don’t think everything is so fragile.” Branch would later head back to Washington and consider writing a book called “The Future of American Decadence,” a title which, though it related to a wholly different subject, the underworld of agents and drug dealers in Miami, nonetheless seemed a perfect reflection of his mood in the aftermath of the campaign.

  Betsey Wright was hired by Creekmore Fath, the liberal benefactor, to run an office whose purpose was to keep Sissy Farenthold’s name politically alive. But soon, at Hillary Rodham’s urging, Wright headed up to Washington to work for the National Women’s Political Caucus, a point from which she dreamed of helping Rodham begin a long march to the White House.

  Mark Blumenthal left for India in search of a six-year-old guru. “If America is going to buy Nixon again,” he told friends before leaving. “I don’t want anything to do with this.”

  Clinton lingered in Austin for several days after the election. He seemed to be in no hurry to return to Yale Law School, where he was enrolled as a third-year student but had not yet set foot in a classroom for his third year. “Aren’t you worried about classes?” Bebe Champ asked him. “Nah, it’s okay,” he replied. One afternoon he was seen carefully going through all the mailing lists and files and letters, transferring names and telephone numbers to his growing personal file of index cards.

  WHAT did his experience in Texas mean to Clinton? He certainly could have spent that summer and fall working for McGovern in Arkansas, where he was planning to begin his political career, or in Connecticut, where he was in law school. “Coming down to Texas had to be part of an agenda,” thought Pat Robards. “It helped him enlarge his base. He made contacts here that he maintained. From then on, we’d all get postcards and fundraising newsletters from him.” Even Mark Blumenthal, the hippie radioman, kept receiving postcards from Clinton after he left Texas. “When he was traveling, these postcards would come in the mail,” Blumenthal recalled. “He’d send them to me, and I was a nobody. When I got one, I said to my wife, ‘This guy’s going somewhere.ߣ”

  Clinton learned an unforgettable lesson in the value of nurturing contacts, according to Roy Spence. “He learned from that race the power of a network; McGovern didn’t have one, and it hurt him.” Beyond Texas, the McGovern campaign proved invaluable to the Democratic party as an incubator for many of the party’s finest organizers, strategists, and policy theorists over the following two decades, people who served as the support staff for the two McGovern aides who later entered the national electoral realm: first Gary Hart and then Clinton. Texas also provided Clinton a training ground to sharpen his skills dealing with contentious factions within the Democratic party, where he learned how difficult and petty politics could be, and what it took to survive. He came away with a stronger commitment to becoming involved.

  As George McGovern watched his young protégé evolve over the ensuing decades, he would note another lesson that Clinton learned from the campaign, a reinforcement, actually, of a political reality that had first become clear to Clinton in Joe Duffey’s campaign two years earlier. “He seemed to take away the lesson of not being caught too far out on the left on defense, welfare, crime. From then on he would take steps to make sure those were marketed in a way to appeal to conservatives and moderates.” But in Clinton’s heart of hearts, McGovern believed then and later, he would always remain “closer to where we were in ’72 than the public thinks.”

  NOT long after he got back to New Haven, Clinton wrote a letter to Creekmore Fath in Austin thanking him for his help and recalling the campaign with a certain wistfulness. “I wonder what’s going on in Texas,” he closed the November 25 letter. “I must confess I miss it and that lost, bumbling battle of ours.” One night during that period he visited the house on Crown Street where Bob Reich and Nancy Bekavac lived and spent several hours delivering an emotional soliloquy on his Texas days. He sat in the living room on their soft, tattered couch, wearing his huge blue winter coat and a grungy white-knit sweater, and described how Lyndon Johnson had gotten fat and grown his hair out and almost looked like a hippie, and how the old LBJ and Roosevelt coalition was breaking up and there seemed to be a meanness in the country. Bekavac recalled that “there was this sense of identification Bill had with the passing of the Age of Titans. It wasn’t a point-by-point analysis and refutation of what had happened in Texas, but more an evocation of what was no longer out there. He translated that into how difficult it would make his own rise in a southern state. He had been part of the largest, most lopsided defeat in American politics. The meaning of this was not lost on him.”

  For the second time in three years Clinton returned from a political campaign to Yale Law School, and once again he had no trouble passing his courses. The only grades came from final exams and papers, and Clinton managed to master them in a few intense weeks of cramming. His academic record at Yale was “very good but not outstanding,” according to a summary that was later sent to the University of Arkansas Law School when he applied for a job there. Many Yale Law students felt that the third year of studies was excessive in any case; they had learned all they needed to know in the first two years. For Hillary Rodham, who had extended her law school career to four years, the final year was even less demanding, allowing her to focus first on the McGovern campaign and then on her work in children’s rights.

  As their law school years neared an end, the class of 1973 went through one final mood swing that spring. Now, at last, Watergate was the big story. At the end of each day the students would bunch together in the lounge and watch the unraveling of the Nixon administration on the nightly news. Bill Coleman felt “a sense of hope” just as they were leaving law school, “a harbinger of the possibility of change.” The team of Rodham and Clinton served together that spring on the board of the Barristers Union, running the Prize Trials. One day Clinton showed up at a board meeting with his hair trimmed and wearing white bucks. He was, thought Robert Alsdorf, who also served on the board, rehearsing for his journey home, back to Arkansas and a life in politics. Alsdorf took one look at Clinton and said, “Let me know when you’re running for president, Bill. I’ll help you.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  HOME AGAIN

  CLINTON WENT OUT into the world as a favorite son, barely eighteen, and now, nine years later, a man of twenty-seven, he was back. He had survived the perilous journey through the sixties and come home with his mission accomplished. He had established his academic credentials at Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale. He had woven his way through the war years undamaged in body if not in soul. He had proved that he could compete with the brightest of his generation, and indeed had constructed a vast network of contemporaries who would stand by him for the rest of his career. He had discovered a wide world of women, including one who might help him get to where he wanted to go and who was, whether he always liked it or not, his match: bright, organized, ambitious, independent, sharp-ton
gued, unafraid of him and yet tolerant of his foibles. He had learned the ways of Capitol Hill and engaged in the rollicking and dirty business of electoral politics in Connecticut and Texas. He had visited the capitals of Europe and gazed upon Lenin’s Tomb and Shelley’s mausoleum and searched in the cold Welsh rain for the birthplace of Dylan Thomas. Now he was home in his green, green grassy place, his folk-tale Arkansas, here to begin Act Two: a political life.

  The story of his return to Arkansas opens with a stretch, a peculiar exaggeration, a myth—harmless perhaps, but peculiarly Clintonian and revealing. The way Clinton would tell the story for years afterward, his hiring as an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law in the fall of 1973 was “a pure accident.” The phrasing is reminiscent of his claim that his avoidance of the draft during the Vietnam War years was “a fluke”—which it most certainly was not, no more than his arrival at the law school in Fayetteville was an accident. In the tale as Clinton would tell it, he was driving home from Connecticut at the end of his Yale days and, acting on a tip from a friendly professor, stopped at a telephone booth along Interstate 40, placed a call to the Arkansas Law School dean, and talked his way into an interview and a job—simple as that, just a spur-of-the-moment bit of roadside serendipity. Wylie H. Davis, the law school dean at the time, would encounter the Clinton version of events years later and find it “amusingly inaccurate and somewhat melodramatic.” And he would ask: “Why degrade a Horatio Alger-type story with a self-inflicted nuisance like the facts?”—to which he could only answer himself that he felt compelled by “neurotic lawyers and history buffs” to set the record straight.

  Clinton began aggressively pursuing a teaching position at Arkansas several months before he got his law degree at Yale. He recruited a political friend from Fayetteville, Steve Smith, to serve as his intermediary. Smith was a liberal young state legislator who had become friendly with Clinton during the McGovern campaign, when he was the only Arkansas delegate at Miami Beach to vote for McGovern on the first ballot. He talked about Clinton to J. Steven Clark, an associate dean at the Arkansas Law School who was also part of the state’s political network. In March 1973, during his spring break from Yale, Clinton contacted Dean Wylie Davis, who would later recall that from that point on, “the entire process was as deliberate and formalized as it was—and had to be—in every new hire case.” The law school received glowing letters of recommendation for Clinton from several professors at Yale as well as a record of his grades, which Davis and his colleagues paid little attention to because they found the Yale grading system “a slightly arrogant and eccentric neo-British affectation”—a cutting but misdirected insult, since the pass-fail system was the product not of haughty academics but of rebellious students.

  Clinton flew to Fayetteville in early May to appear before the Faculty Appointments Committee. David Newbern, who chaired the committee, had a curious first impression of the young applicant from Yale. On the morning of Clinton’s first day in town, Newbern stopped at the Holiday Inn where Clinton was staying to pick him up and escort him to the law school for a day of interviews. He encountered Clinton in the coffee shop talking to Steve Smith. Newbern wondered how Clinton knew Smith and why he would be engaged in such an intense political conversation on the morning when he was interviewing to become a law teacher. Later, he escorted Clinton from one faculty office to another. Finally, in an exit interview, Newbern asked the question that had been troubling him all day.

  “Bill, are you coming to Arkansas to teach with us, are you coming because you want to be a law professor, or is this just a stepping stone?”

  “I have no plans at this time to run for public office,” Clinton said.

  It was, Newbern thought, the classic political response.

  Whatever Clinton’s intentions, the Arkansas law faculty was greatly impressed. “He charmed us all right out of our mortarboards,” said Dean Davis, who thought that Clinton displayed “a wide range of interests and learning for a young person.” Clinton talked politics incessantly during the interview, but it did not bother Davis much because “in Arkansas, politics is a hobby for everybody, so it didn’t seem out of place.” Newbern, Mort Gitelman, and a few other professors raised questions about Clinton before the faculty voted on him. They were impressed by his Rhodes Scholarship and the rest of his résumé, but wondered whether he would make a good scholar. “It was very clear even back then that Clinton’s main goal was a political career,” Gitelman recalled. “The faculty debated the appointment on the theory of whether he would make a legal scholar and do the publications.” In the end they were convinced that he would excel as a classroom teacher, and was worth the gamble. The vote was unanimous. Clinton was offered the job on May 12 and accepted May 22.

  He moved to Fayetteville in midsummer and rented a contemporary stone and glass one-bedroom house in the country about ten miles southeast of town along Route 16 on the road to Elkins and a route through the hills known as the Pig Trail. The mimosa-blossomed winding roads, rolling hills, lazy-looped rivers, thick pine forests, and green-gorge vistas of north-west Arkansas were hauntingly beautiful and familiar to him. He considered all of Arkansas his home, and Fayetteville in the Ozarks represented his carefree backyard, the place he had escaped to during the summers of his youth to attend band camp. But it also had another meaning that evoked profoundly different feelings in him. The university and its row of fraternity houses served as the social nexus and training ground of the Arkansas good ole boy establishment. Four years earlier, when he was contemplating attending the University of Arkansas Law School so that he could join the ROTC program there and avert the draft, the notion of returning to Fayetteville made Bill Clinton feel strange. Part of the equation that sent him back to Oxford for a second year instead of choosing the safe haven of the state university was the queasiness he felt about getting stuck in Arkansas, a place which seemed “barren” of global thinkers and intellectual stimulation, as he had written in a letter to Rick Stearns.

  So his relocation in Fayetteville was not an entirely simple homecoming. His relationship with his state was shaped by a triangular internal contradiction that would stay with him from then on and is crucial to understanding Clinton’s political evolution. At one point of the triangle was myth: the way he would romanticize the Arkansas of huge watermelons and simple country folk, especially when he was away from it. At a second point of the triangle was pragmatism: the realization that Arkansas was the easiest base, the only base, for his political rise. At the third point of the triangle was ambition: a powerful desire to move beyond his provincial roots. Clinton would make it seem that he came home to Arkansas and stayed there for two decades out of pure love and obligation—but events would soon prove otherwise.

  On August 23, not long after he had settled, he appeared at a watermelon party of the Washington County Democratic Central Committee in the sprawling two-acre backyard behind the grand old house of Ann and Morriss Henry along Highway 45. The party regulars at the Henry house were local figures of the sort that any aspiring politician would need to know, hardcore committed Democratic loyalists who performed the drudge work of organization and were the primary sources of inside political gossip. Clinton swept through the crowd as though he were an honored guest. “He came in … he wasn’t invited but somebody brought him … he had just got to town, he shook hands, he talked, and by the time he left he knew every single person there,” Ann Henry recalled later. “It was a perfect way for him to leave an impression.”

  Clinton was eager to make an impression and quickly took on several projects outside the law school. He filed an amicus brief in support of his friend Steve Smith, who was a key figure in a voting-fraud case being heard in rural Madison County. Republicans charged that Smith had interfered in the 1972 election by helping elderly residents fill out their ballots at a nursing home. Smith said that he and two nursing-home employees merely helped distribute the ballots. Clinton, in his friend of the court brief, presented
a legal argument placing Smith’s assistance within the boundaries of laws relating to ballot delivery. The court eventually disallowed the twenty-five votes that Smith had garnered at the nursing home, not enough to change the election outcome. The case attracted the interest of political reporters in northwest Arkansas. “Clinton came up and sat in the jury box with us,” recalled veteran political reporter Brenda Blagg of The Morning News in Springdale. “He was part of the crowd.”

  His first challenge to the local establishment came in Springdale, a comfortable middle-class community north of Fayetteville, where he formed a friendship with Rudy Moore, Jr., a progressive state legislator whose law firm had business and political connections to Senator Fulbright. Weeks before Clinton arrived, Fulbright had met with Moore and told him that a young man who had been on his staff was moving to the area to teach at the law school, and that he and Moore “ought to know about each other.” Clinton called Moore when he got to town and they spent hours talking politics. “Right off the bat,” Moore recalled later, Clinton became absorbed in a local issue involving doctors who were rejecting Medicaid patients. Medicaid was not a popular social program then among Springdale’s doctors. Moore agreed to lend the clout of his legislative office to Clinton’s informal poll, which found only one or two doctors in town who were willing to accept Medicaid patients. In his first political encounter with the health care issue, Clinton got nowhere. The Springdale doctors “crawled all over” Moore for “sending somebody to look into” their affairs. Moore and Clinton backed away, but not before Clinton had rung up one strike against him among the doctors.