First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  DURING his lunch hour one day in early January 1974, Clinton sat in his cramped third-floor office at Waterman Hall placing telephone calls. One call went to Ron Addington, a doctoral student and instructor in the school of education who was interested in politics and had told a mutual acquaintance that he wanted to meet Clinton. “Why don’t you come over and let’s visit,” Clinton said when he reached him. They had common bonds. They were born within a month of each other in 1946 in the same area; Addington grew up in DeQueen some thirty-five miles from Hope. He was an Army reservist, conservative in dress, bearing and haircut. Clinton was wearing blue jeans, leather moccasin boots, a checkered shirt with a tie, and a corduroy sports jacket. His hair was long and curly. His appearance did not match Addington’s expectations, which were closer to “the stereotype of a person who runs for office.” But the two clicked, and Addington agreed to help Clinton prepare for his race for Congress.

  Later that week, Clinton asked Addington to travel with him for a day of political meetings in Russellville, an important city in the congressional district some three hours away on the road to Little Rock. The journey ended in embarrassment. After meeting various political officials in town all day, Clinton and Addington were taken to dinner at the local country club as the guests of a wealthy attorney and political powerbroker whom Clinton was intent on recruiting to his side. As the dinner conversation dragged on, it became clear that Clinton was getting tipsy. Never much of a drinker, he was politely downing his drinks with everyone else at the table. His sentences became less and less understandable. It was clear to Addington that Clinton could not drink and remain coherent. In the car on the way back to Fayetteville, Addington scolded Clinton for his behavior. “I don’t know whether you can drink while campaigning,” he said. “Don’t try it again.” The lesson was brought home soon enough when the attorney endorsed another candidate.

  Addington was in Little Rock, spending the weekend with his girlfriend, when Clinton called him from Fayetteville on the Sunday morning of February 24.

  “I’m announcing tomorrow,” Clinton said.

  “Tomorrow?” Addington gasped.

  “Yeah. We’re setting up some press conferences.”

  “Okay, let’s do it!” Addington said.

  That was Clinton, he thought: impetuous, hungry, thinking that he could conquer the world in a day. And this was not even a normal day. It was a Sunday. And Clinton wanted press conferences in four cities—Hot Springs, his home town; Little Rock, the state capital and headquarters for the state political press corps; Fort Smith, the largest city in the Third District; and Fayetteville, Clinton’s new base. Addington told Clinton that he would go to work on rounding up the press and meet Clinton in Russellville, a midpoint in the triangle between Little Rock, where Addington was staying, Fayetteville, where Clinton was, and Hot Springs, where they would both spend the night in preparation for the first press conference the next morning. They agreed to meet at the AQ Chicken House in Russellville that afternoon. First Addington called Doug Wallace, the editor of the University of Arkansas student newspaper, who was part of Clinton’s team, and who had already spent Friday and Saturday preparing press packets. Then Addington got in the car with his girlfriend and headed north. When they reached the Chicken House, Addington hopped out and said goodbye to his girlfriend, who drove on to Fayetteville alone. From a telephone outside the restaurant, Addington began tracking down reporters to let them know the plans for the next day.

  Clinton arrived in his Gremlin, late, and he and Addington headed out over the mountain from Russellville to Hot Springs, one of the most perilous, twisting drives in Arkansas. Halfway through the trip, Addington turned to Clinton and said, “If we survive, you are never going to drive again when I’m in the car!” Clinton was driving as he always drove, carelessly, talking and gesturing the whole time, his eyes often off the road, every now and then swerving wildly into the oncoming lane or running his right tires onto the shoulder. The car had no passing power, but Clinton would try to pass anyway, usually when he was chugging uphill heading into a blind curve.

  At eight o’clock on Monday morning in frigid twenty-two-degree weather, sixty Clinton friends and relatives gathered at the Avanelle Motor Lodge in Hot Springs for the announcement. Ten relatives from the Clinton family were there, along with the parents of his high school friends: Phil Jamison’s mother, Ronnie Cecil’s father, Jim French’s dad. Elizabeth Buck, Clinton’s old Latin teacher, stood in the back near Virgil Spurlin, his high school band director. Here, at long last, was the opening moment of Bill Clinton’s political career. He went after Hammerschmidt right away, ignoring the three other candidates for the Democratic nomination. He characterized Hammerschmidt as a close political ally of Nixon’s and tried to link him to Watergate by saying, “Of all the men in Congress, he is one of those who has allowed the President to go as far as he has.” If the people “demand more honest politics,” Clinton declared, “they’ll get more honest politics.”

  His mother Virginia was nearby. “All smiles,” as Addington remembered her. “All smiles and laughing.”

  CARL Whillock’s old card file was not the only valuable collection of names that Clinton turned to when he began his electoral career. He already had a file of his own, a cardboard box stuffed with alphabetized and annotated index cards listing the addresses and telephone numbers of classmates, professors, political organizers, and others he had encountered during his long apprenticeship. He spent time each night combing through the file, placing telephone calls, and writing notes to friends who might help his campaign.

  Two years earlier, while working for McGovern in Texas, he had told Houston organizer Billie Carr that he was going home to Arkansas to begin a political career that would culminate with a run for president. Now he called her and said proudly, “Billie, I’m on my way!” He also called Bob Armstrong and John C. White and Taylor Branch, who was back in Washington serving as the Washington editor of Harper’s magazine. Though Branch by then had soured some on electoral politics and was hardly wealthy, he responded by contributing $250. It was, in a sense, a one-man phone bank and direct-mail operation. Most of Clinton’s friends from Georgetown, Oxford, Yale, and Texas took note of the inevitable—their irrepressible pal Clinton had finally begun his lifetime race—and chuckled as they took his call or opened his letter. For the most part, they were charmed. Clinton was the master of the soft sell. He remembered the smallest details of people’s lives, and his deftness at personalizing the notes tended to overcome whatever unseemliness might otherwise have tainted a blatantly political contact.

  A letter he sent to Charlie Daniels, the plumbing contractor from Norton, Virginia, who had met Clinton four years earlier at the National Hotel in Moscow, stands as a perfect example of how Clinton would present himself: good-humored, humble, flattering, familiar: Dear Charlie,” he began.

  I don’t know if you’ll remember me but this is the last day of the week we were together in Moscow four years ago now. I have been thinking of you, as I always do this time of year…. I am about to embark on a campaign for Congress against an entrenched GOP incumbent. I remember thinking when we were together what a campaigner you’d be—You’re sure welcome here. Ha! My mother has never forgotten your thoughtful phone call upon your return from Russia. All the best, Bill Clinton.

  Daniels was a registered Republican, but from then on, Clinton was his man. He visited Arkansas often, and even more often sent Clinton campaign checks.

  The return rate on Clinton’s personal direct-mail effort was uneven. Many of his young friends sent donations of between $10 and $50. “Sorry I couldn’t send more,” wrote Garry Mauro, who headed the Students for McGovern effort in Texas in 1972. Women friends old and new seemed to be reliable sources. Hillary Rodham wrote out two early checks for $400. Lyda Holt chipped in with $125. The Leckford Road connection was also fruitful. Strobe Talbott contributed $300, as did Brooke Shearer. The rest of the Shearer family, who served as Clinton’s
hosts when he visited California, also supported his congressional bid. Brooke’s brothers, Derek and Cody, both journalists, gave a total of $450, and her mother, Marva Shearer, contributed $200. The first $10,000 of his campaign came from a source closer to home: a Hot Springs bank loan co-signed by his uncle Raymond Clinton and Gabe Crawford of the Oaklawn Pharmacy.

  • • •

  THE Third District was more than Fayetteville, Fort Smith, and Hot Springs. Most of the twenty-one county district lay out in the northern hills, the region that Clinton and Paul Fray had targeted as the key to the election during their meeting in early December. It was a vast rural region steeped in country folkways. To get to Washington, Clinton would have to travel deep into the backwaters of his native state. At an organizational meeting of Clinton supporters in Fayetteville a few days after the announcement, Carl Whillock unfolded a map of Arkansas and traced the two-lane roads and highways leading from one county seat to another in the Third District. He knew the distances from town to town: with twists and turns through the hills, destinations were always far longer in minutes than in miles. Each time his hand stopped at a town, Whillock had a story to tell about a friend in the courthouse or at the weekly newspaper. He proposed that he and Clinton spend a day together driving through the hills from courthouse to courthouse.

  They left at dawn on Wednesday, March 6. Whillock had not prearranged any meetings for the trip. He knew the daily patterns of the people he wanted Clinton to meet. They would be where they always were, and no matter what they were doing they would have time for an old friend. The political explorers headed north and east out of Fayetteville on Highway 62 until they reached Berryville, a town that Whillock knew intimately as the home town of his former boss, the late congressman Trimble. The rural essence of the district Clinton sought to represent was brought home to him at this first stop. Berryville was a county seat of Carroll County—not the county seat but a county seat. There were two county seats, with their own separate courthouses: Eureka Springs on the western side of the Kings River and Berryville on the eastern side—a vestige of the days, not so long ago in these parts of Arkansas, when rivers were difficult to cross. At the Berryville courthouse they met Eileen Harvey, the circuit court clerk and recorder of deeds, who cherished the memory of Trimble as her “dearest friend” and had once been a member of the same church as Whillock. “Carl tells me you know how to run in these hills,” Clinton said to Harvey. He asked Harvey for her help. She gave it, not only offering to take him around the county, even across the Kings River, but also persuading her daughter to work in Clinton’s county campaign. “We hit it off,” Harvey said later. “He loved people and loved campaigning and I did too. Politics is nothing more than a selling game.”

  From the courthouse, Whillock and Clinton drove out to the Methodist parsonage in Berryville, where they met a young minister, Victor Nixon, and his wife, Freddie Nixon, who were leading peace and civil rights activists. “We sat around the front porch and visited for an hour or so,” Whillock recalled. “And Freddie agreed to be Bill’s Carroll County coordinator.” That conversation on the porch began a long relationship between Clinton and the Nixons that was marked by deeply emotional moments. Victor Nixon would later serve as the minister at Clinton’s wedding. Freddie Nixon would become one of Clinton’s aides, and their friendship would bend but not break in a profound disagreement over the use of the death penalty.

  The next stop was in the little town of Alpena on the border separating Carroll and Boone counties at a drive-in restaurant run by the wife of an old cattle farmer, Bo Forney, who served on the Democratic central committee. Forney was a rough-faced, gruff-talking, overweight character in bib overalls, seemingly a world apart from the young Rhodes Scholar with the curly hair and long sideburns. But again, Clinton knew how to talk Forney’s language and won him over. The cattle farmer contributed $405 to Clinton’s campaign before the year was through.

  Driving east on Highway 65, Whillock and Clinton reached Harrison, the county seat of Boone County and the heart of enemy territory, Hammerschmidt’s home. Harrison was a major hub in northwest Arkansas, large enough to have its own daily newspaper, the Harrison Daily Times, and Whillock knew the editor, J. E. Dunlap. Whillock realized that Dunlap, who wrote a column under his initials, J.E.D., was an ally of the incumbent congressman, JPH, but he took Clinton in to see him anyway, hoping to “soften J.E.D. up.” It was a surprisingly productive visit. In that afternoon’s paper, across page 2 from JPH’s “Capitol Report” column opposing congressional pay increases, J.E.D. took note of his visitors from Fayetteville. “One candidate has already hit the ground running. He’s running on the Democratic ticket for Congress in the 3rd District,” J.E.D. wrote. “Bill Clinton, native of Hope, graduate of Hot Springs high school, a Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Yale Law School, now a teacher in the U of A Law School, was in town this morning with a former aide of the late Cong. Jim Trimble, Carl Whillock. Clinton was shaking hands on a tour through the Harrison area.”

  Highway 62 took the travelers east out of Harrison and along the White River through Yellville and Flippin. It was Clinton’s first glimpse of a scenic region where he would later, much to his eventual regret, invest in a vacation home development enterprise known as Whitewater. They reached the northeastern terminus of their trip in Mountain Home, where they met with Baxter County treasurer Vada Sheid at her family furniture shop. “These two men walk in,” Sheid recalled later. “I knew Whillock from his days with Trimble. He introduced me to young Bill Clinton, a very personable young man. We found a place in the store to sit down and visit.” Clinton cast his spell on another older woman. He was “the kind of person,” Sheid thought, “who makes you want to be friendly with him.” It quickly became clear that she and Clinton had much in common. They both loved politics—and more: “He said his birthday was August 19 when I asked him his age. I said, “That’s my birthday, too. That makes us both Leos!“I felt Leos had the same ideas about people. I agreed wholeheartedly to support him.”

  As Clinton rose to leave, Sheid noticed that a button had fallen off his shirt. “Now, Bill,” she said, “you need a button sewn on your shirt if you’re going to run for congressman.” She had him sit still for a minute as she found a needle and thread and made him presentable again. It was the first of many times over the years when the friendly furniture store merchant would come to the aid of her ambitious young astrologically aligned friend. Two years after that first meeting in Mountain Home, she was elected to the Arkansas legislature, and a decade later she would cast a decisive vote that saved Clinton’s reputation at the same time that it may have cost Sheid her career.

  When they left Sheid Furniture, Whillock and Clinton temporarily split up. Clinton said he wanted to visit the newspaper office. “You do that,” Whillock said, “and I’ll go find Hugh and we’ll meet at the drugstore at four.” Hugh was Hugh Hackler, an old friend who had served in the Arkansas legislature with Whillock in the 1950s. At that point in the afternoon, Whillock guessed correctly that he would find the retired Hackler in the pool hall playing dominoes with his friends. Whillock took Hackler aside after the game.

  “Hugh, I’m traveling with Bill Clinton, a fine young man running for Congress. I’d like you to meet him,” Whillock said.

  Hackler responded coolly. He said he had already promised people that he would support a candidate from Fort Smith, Gene Rainwater, in the Democratic primary.

  “Well, I’m sorry you’ve done that, but Bill Clinton is going to be around a long time,” Whillock responded. “One of these days he’s gonna be governor or senator and you’ll need to know him.” That was enough to persuade Hackler to accompany Whillock over to the drugstore.

  Whillock and Hackler found a spot in a red and tan booth with a black Formica table. They ordered coffee. Hackler was in his sixties and conservatively dressed. Clinton came in at four, sat down, and ordered a Coke. Whillock was not sure how his old friend would get along with his new one, but he
need not have worried. The conversation began with a coincidence and only improved from there.

  “Where’d you grow up?” Hackler asked.

  “Hot Springs,” Clinton said.

  “I’ve got a good friend in Hot Springs. But I don’t imagine you’d know him.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Gabe Crawford. He runs some drugstores there.”

  Gabe Crawford was one of the closest friends of Clinton’s mother and late stepfather. This was the same Gabe Crawford who had joined Raymond Clinton in co-signing the loan that gave Clinton the first $10,000 of his campaign. “We practically live at the Crawfords,” Clinton said. “We’re over at their house all the time.”

  After fifteen minutes of easy conversation, Hackler turned to Whillock and proclaimed: “Carl, I’m gonna call my friends and change this. I want to support Bill.”

  The last stops on the trip were in Marshall, the county seat of Searcy County, where they met with newspaper editors, and then the little town of St. Joe, where they visited Will Goggins, chairman of the county Democratic party. It was after nine when they reached St. Joe and Goggins was already in bed, with the lights out, but he answered the door, invited Whillock and Clinton in, and talked with them for an hour. Goggins was a Clinton man for the rest of his life. From St. Joe they retraced their path up and across Highway 65, weaving through the woods and river valleys in the darkness of an early Arkansas spring. It was after midnight when they got back to Fayetteville. Whillock was shocked to see that his wife and children were still up. “You really missed it!” one of his kids yelled excitedly. What had they missed? It seems that the latest campus fad had reached Fayetteville that night. For several hours, naked young men and women had been streaking up and down Maple Street past the Whillocks’ house.