Addington felt that he already knew Hillary. In the early stages of the campaign, he was constantly taking telephone calls from her. She would check on Clinton’s schedule, then offer practical political suggestions. Even then, at the dawn of Clinton’s electoral career, from halfway across the country, at a time when she and Clinton were uncertain about their relationship and while she was working long days and nights on the impeachment inquiry, Rodham was pushing Clinton’s political interests. “She started calling from day one, several times a day at first,” Addington recalled. “She was telling me, you need to get this done, you need to get that done. What positions we had to fill.”
But apparently Hillary never mentioned that her father and brother were driving down from Illinois. “Well, how long are you going to be here to visit?” Addington asked.
“Hell, I don’t know,” Hugh Rodham said. “Hillary told me I ought to come down here and help you out.”
The Rodham men had met Clinton a few times during his Yale Law School days, when Hillary brought him home to Park Ridge. Although Hugh was conservative and had never voted for a Democrat, his family was leaning to the liberal side, not just Hillary but also the boys, and he was, above all, a Rodham loyalist. If Hillary urged him to work for Clinton, that was what he would do. It was a matter of family, not politics. Doug Wallace, the campaign press secretary, thought it seemed irrelevant to Rodham “why he was down there, besides the fact that his daughter told him to do it.”
The Rodhams reported for work the next morning. What should they do? The office was overcrowded; there were not enough telephones and desks for the staff and volunteers. But there were stacks of “Clinton for Congress” signs that needed to be put up along the roadsides in the rural counties. And so the Rodham sign detail was born. Day after day, they would load signs into the trunk and roam the back roads in search of prime locations for cheap political advertising. Sometimes the campaign staff got inquiries from the field about the Yankees in the Cadillac. The calls prompted a discussion about whether they should smear the license plates with mud to obscure the fact that the car and its occupants were not from Arkansas. But the Rodhams were quickly embraced by the campaign staff and most of the people they encountered on the road. The old man seemed “rougher than a corn cob, as gruff as could be,” in Addington’s words, but he was a straight talker and a hard worker. In some respects, as a handyman who loved fly-fishing, he was more of a natural in the Ozarks than Clinton, whose main backwoods talent was storytelling. And young Tony seemed to be having the time of his life.
There was another aspect to the presence of Hillary’s father and brother in Fayetteville while she was still in Washington. One of the worst-kept secrets at headquarters was that Clinton had become involved in an intense relationship with a young woman volunteer who was a student at the university. According to Doug Wallace, “the staff tried to ignore it as long as it didn’t interfere with the campaign.” Aside from the Fayetteville woman, the staff also knew that Clinton had girlfriends in several towns around the district and in Little Rock. Perhaps they could disregard his rambunctious private life, but could Hillary? There was some suspicion that one of the reasons she sent the men in her family to Arkansas was to put a check on her boyfriend’s activities.
Paul Fray arrived in Fayetteville with his wife Mary Lee to work on the campaign shortly after the Rodhams appeared on the scene. He quickly surmised that “Hillary had put the hammer on her daddy to go down there and make sure everything was hunky-dory. It was her little spying mission.” One afternoon Fray was at Clinton’s house in the country, going over the schedule for the next few weeks. “The phone rings and it’s Hillary and she’s raising hell” about Clinton’s behavior, Fray recalled from what he heard of the conversation and from what Clinton told him after hanging up. Hillary, according to Fray, tried to make Clinton jealous by informing him that she was going to sleep with someone in Washington. Clinton “about broke down and cried” at that point, but rather than getting mad he launched into a long emotional appeal, saying that Hillary should not “go and do something that would make life miserable” for both of them.
IN the May primary against three opponents and again in the June 11 runoff against Gene Rainwater, a state senator from Fort Smith, Clinton was a political whirlwind. He began with 12 percent name recognition and little money, and ended up easily prevailing in both races. The other candidates had regional power bases, but they were overmatched by Clinton’s organizational skills and energy. The state AFL-CIO was ready to endorse Rainwater until Clinton appeared before the labor board’s Committee on Political Education in Hot Springs. “Bill’s knowledge and facility with words made our people fall in love with him,” recalled J. Bill Becker, head of the state labor federation. “He just took it right away from Rainwater.” Like so many of the people who were drawn into Clinton’s orbit, the workers in his congressional campaign were alternately inspired and exhausted. College students accustomed to staying up late, but also sleeping late, had a hard time keeping pace with him.
He was always on the move from town to town, staying in the homes of old friends or newfound political allies, or at his mother’s place if they ended the night near Hot Springs. His schedule was invariably on the remake, thrown off by his compulsion to stop and chat. He was, according to Jim Daugherty, a law student who was one of his drivers, “more interested in finishing the conversation than in finishing the schedule.” Sometimes the Fayetteville staff lost touch with him. If he was working the southern stretch of the district, they would leave messages at the “Y” City Café, certain that he would stop at that tiny crossroads eatery on his way between Hot Springs and Fort Smith, lured by the gossip awaiting him there and the seductive coconut cream pie. A legion of law students served as his drivers and travel aides. On the road between stops, Clinton would take his Professor Quigley—inspired fifteen-minute catnaps, and scribble the outlines of his next speech. Chomping on a sandwich and talking at the same time, he would launch into a soliloquy about the ravages of inflation or of black lung disease, an issue in the mining towns of the Arkansas River valley.
For many politicians, the incessant demands of a campaign are the most enervating aspects of public life. One face after another, one more plea for money, one more speech where the words blur in dull repetition—at some point it can become too much. Morriss Henry, a state legislator from Fayetteville who along with his wife, Ann, befriended Clinton in 1974, realized one night that he lacked the characteristic that he saw in Clinton, the energy required to go the distance in politics. Henry, an eye doctor, had worked all day performing cataract surgery and came home “totally beat,” but corraled the kids and his wife into the Dodge van to attend a pie supper outside Fayetteville. On the way down, he suddenly blurted out, “Do we really have to go?” Two-thirds of the way there, he answered himself. “No! We don’t.” He had hit his political wall, and he turned around.
Clinton would never turn around. To him, the prospect of attending a pie supper in “Y” City or Mount Ida seemed invigorating. Pie suppers rank among the most cherished political folk rituals in western Arkansas. On any Saturday night during an election season, communities gather for an evening of entertainment as pies and cakes baked by local women are sold at auction, with the money going to volunteer fire departments or other civic institutions. One savory pecan pie can sell for three figures, especially if the politicians in attendance try to buy some goodwill and end up in a bidding war, as frequently happens. The candidates vie for microphone time between pie sales and announcements. Homemade desserts, picnic tables lined with voters, plenty of talking and raucous storytelling, usually some barbecue at the rear counter—Clinton was never more in his element. He also realized that every pie supper he attended helped him transform his image from the long-haired Rhodes Scholar and law professor into a young man of the people.
Before his eyes he saw what could happen to a politician who failed to connect with ordinary people during that first sp
ring of his electoral career when the state’s Democratic primary voters denied J. William Fulbright the nomination, unsentimentally ending his thirty-year career in the Senate. Fulbright had raised and spent more money than any previous candidate in Arkansas and barely received one-third of the vote as he was over-whelmed by Dale Bumpers, the popular governor. Bumpers had an 85 percent approval rating while Fulbright’s was in the low 30s. The polls showed that voters no longer accepted Fulbright’s stature in international affairs as a sufficient trade-off for his indifference to local concerns. The unease about Fulbright’s distance from his constituents had increased year by year. Now, finally, all efforts by his staff to make him seem like a regular guy were futile. They presented him as plain old Bill and outfitted him in flannel shirts, but the people had already decided that Fulbright was no longer one of them.
Clinton intended to assist Fulbright during the primary, according to James Blair, the senator’s campaign manager, but became so involved in his own campaign that he never got around to helping his old boss. On the campaign trail, he more often found himself associating with Pryor and Bumpers when they stumped in the Third Congressional District. Arkansas political observers taking their first look at Clinton saw elements of Pryor and Bumpers in his style. He had Pryor’s ability to work a room, and Bumpers’s power to sway a crowd as an extemporaneous speaker. As the campaign wore on, the resemblances became more apparent: Clinton would study the two men, borrow a colloquialism from one, a hand gesture from the other, and incorporate them in his routine. It is not a contradiction to say that he was both a natural politician and an artful imitator, for those two types may in fact be one and the same; natural politicians are skilled actors, recreating reality, adjusting and ad-libbing, synthesizing the words, ideas, and feelings of others, slipping into different roles in different scenes, saying the same thing over and over again and making it seem like they are saying it for the first time. It can be at once a creative art yet wholly derivative, which is the best way to understand Bill Clinton’s political persona as he reached the public stage.
In early July, after he had secured the Democratic nomination, Clinton went to Hot Springs for his ten-year high school reunion, the first time that the class of 1964 had reconvened. The theme of the reunion at the Velda Rose Hotel was “The Way We Were,” the title song of that year’s nostalgic film starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. Photographs from the Old Gold yearbook lined the banquetroom walls. The Hot Springs Sentinel-Record described Clinton as “the most prominent graduate”—a Rhodes Scholar, University of Arkansas law professor, and Democratic candidate for Congress. He was seated at the front table along with his friend Phil Jamison, the class president, a naval lieutenant at Pensacola who had flown helicopters in Vietnam. The article noted that Carolyn Yeldell had now married and was teaching music in Indiana, and that Jim French, the quarterback, was in New Orleans training to be a doctor. David Leopoulos, Clinton’s closest childhood friend, had begun a job at a community college in Florida. Of those present, there were twenty-one housewives, two lawyers, nine engineers, four secretaries, one minister, four bankers, and four doctors. “Lots of them,” Clinton was quoted as saying of his classmates, “are doing impressive things I haven’t done.”
Clinton delivered a brief speech, but the crowd seemed to have little interest in politics. At the ten-year point, Jamison found that his classmates did not seem particularly interested in looking backward or forward, but were “caught in the here and now, trying to make their way.” After the dinner, Clinton spent most of the night on the dance floor, enjoying himself with a string of old girlfriends. But not everyone was lost in the moment. Jamison was cornered in the hallway by Rodney Wilson, a former Marine and Vietnam veteran. At first they traded war stories as though they were recalling old memories from high school, but the more Wilson talked, the more intense he became. He seemed depressed, and said he felt out of place and mistreated since his return from Vietnam.
Clinton, too, was still haunted by Vietnam that summer. The manner in which he had avoided military service in 1969 might be raised by John Paul Hammerschmidt’s campaign. Hammerschmidt was a World War II Air Force pilot who strongly supported the war and had close ties to veterans“ groups in the district. The documentary record of Clinton’s actions after he received his draft notice at Oxford five years earlier, including the letter to Colonel Holmes in which he thanked Holmes for eventually saving him from the draft, rested in a file inside a fireproof half-ton vault at the University of Arkansas ROTC building a few blocks down the hill from the law school. Clinton’s usual response to anyone who asked him about his military record was that he had received a high draft number in the lottery and was never called. He discussed the more complicated details of his draft history, and the letter to Holmes, with only a few friends. One was Paul Fray. “He told me what he said in the letter about the war,” Fray said later. “I told him that he could get into a pickle if the Republicans got the letter and that he should try to get the original back.”
Colonel Holmes had retired, and was living in northwest Arkansas. How Clinton contacted him and persuaded him to return the letter is unclear. Some members of the ROTC staff believe that Clinton relied on intermediaries from the university administration, where he had several friends and political supporters. Decades later, the colonel would label Clinton a draft dodger and claim that he had been deceived by the young man, but the evidence indicates that in 1974 he was still willing to help Clinton. ROTC drill instructor Ed Howard later recalled that Colonel Holmes called him one morning that summer and “said he wanted the Clinton letter out of the files.” Howard, a noncommissioned officer, was alone in the office; most of the staff was at summer training at Fort Riley, Kansas. He called the unit commander, Colonel Guy Tutwiler, at Fort Riley and informed him of Holmes’s request. Tutwiler instructed Howard to make a copy of the Clinton letter and give it to Holmes, but to keep the original. A member of Holmes’s family stopped by the ROTC headquarters and picked up the letter.
Later that afternoon, Tutwiler called Howard again and told him to take the original letter and everything else in that file, which was among the records the ROTC had maintained on Vietnam War-era dissidents, and to send it to him at Fort Riley by certified mail. According to Howard, Tutwiler later explained that he had “destroyed the file, burned the file,” because the military no longer maintained dissident files and he did not feel that Clinton’s letter should ever “be used against him for political reasons.” According to Fray, Clinton ended up with a copy of his letter to Holmes, and assumed that “the situation was done with.” He did not know that Holmes’s top aide, Lieutenant Colonel Clinton Jones, had already made a copy of the letter.
ON Friday, August 9, the day that President Nixon resigned, Clinton was campaigning in the northeastern end of the congressional district. He arrived in Mountain Home that evening for the third day of his stay with Mike and Suzanne Lee, who had made their home his regional headquarters. The Lees were old friends who had been in the class behind his at Hot Springs High. Mike had attended the Naval Academy with Phil Jamison, and he and Jamison had stayed at Clinton’s Georgetown room whenever they could escape Annapolis for the weekend.
It was all part of the easy reciprocity of Clinton’s world. He never had any money, he was always living off the grace of friends, yet his give-and-take spirit made it possible for him to sleep at other people’s houses and clean out their refrigerators because he was bound to repay them with some act of generosity down the line. Now he was at the Lees’ house in Mountain Home and the American political world was turning upside down. He sat in the living room and watched as Nixon announced that he was leaving the White House. Well after midnight, a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette called the house. Suzanne answered and went to the guest bedroom, awakening Clinton. He went to the kitchen to take the call, leaning against the wall, still half-asleep. It was, Suzanne said later, “amazing to listen to him. It was just like a rehearsed speech t
hat he had been waiting to give. I couldn’t believe he could do it right out of a deep sleep.” But Clinton would not say publicly what he thought about Nixon’s resignation: that it was good for the country but bad for him. “This is going to cost me the race,” he confided to Mike Lee. The convulsions of Nixon’s resignation, he said, would make the voters of northwest Arkansas less inclined to throw Hammerschmidt out.
Throughout that summer of the Watergate inquiry, Clinton had emphasized Hammerschmidt’s friendship and support of Nixon. The Republican congressman tried to argue that “the people are tired of Watergate,” but most evidence was to the contrary. Watergate filled up so much space in the political world that there was little room left for other questions, such as whether Clinton was too young and too liberal for the electorate. The more the public turned against Nixon, the more Clinton gained momentum. When Nixon resigned, as Clinton predicted, his campaign “went into a stall,” according to press secretary Doug Wallace. “The voters stopped to catch their breath. Suddenly there was no Nixon to rail against.”
Nixon’s resignation was one of three major transitions for Clinton and his campaign late that summer. One afternoon, Clinton’s mother came home from her hospital work with a carry-out dinner for her husband, Jeff Dwire, to discover him dead of heart failure brought on by diabetes. Dwire had been a soothing influence on Virginia during their five-year marriage. He was a charming dandy who enjoyed life and had had his own scrapes with the law, but he was kind to Virginia and her boys, and he made her happy in a way that no other man had since Bill Blythe. During his year in prison, he had become a jailhouse lawyer of sorts, acquiring enough knowledge to discuss legal subjects with Clinton and Rodham when they were at Yale. Dwire had been the one member of the family to accept Hillary warmly, a gesture that was reciprocated by Bill Clinton, who wrote a letter of support when Dwire unsuccessfully sought a pardon.
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