First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Everyone at campaign headquarters knew Dwire. Shortly before he died, he had spent several days in Fayetteville answering the telephones and offering advice. Paul Fray noticed the flashy rings on Dwire’s fingers and worried about what the Hammerschmidt forces would do if they learned that he was assisting the campaign. “The last thing we needed was for word to get out about Clinton’s stepfather with a prison record.”

  Dwire’s death and Nixon’s resignation were matters of consequence, yet in terms of their sustained effect on Clinton, they could not compare with the third event of late summer, the arrival of Hillary Rodham, who provoked a complicated set of reactions in her boyfriend and the people around him. On one level, Clinton feared that Rodham was too much of a potential political star to make the sacrifice of living in Arkansas. Once, earlier, when Clinton told Diane Kincaid, the political science professor at Arkansas, how much she reminded him of Rodham and made him miss her, the professor asked him why he did not just marry Rodham and bring her to Arkansas. “Because she’s so good at what she does, she could have an amazing political career on her own,” Clinton said. “If she comes to Arkansas it’s going to be my state, my future. She could be president someday. She could go to any state and be elected to the Senate. If she comes to Arkansas, she’ll be on my turf.”

  That turf, Clinton realized, could appear inhospitable to his Yankee girlfriend. His mother and younger brother made little effort to hide their distaste for her. Whenever the Frays visited Hot Springs during the campaign, Virginia would complain to them about Hillary. “Virginia loathed Hillary then,” Mary Lee Fray recalled. “Anything she could find to pick on about Hillary she would pick on. Hillary did not fit her mold for Bill.” But even if it was not a natural fit, Clinton seemed determined to lure her to stay in Arkansas. He encouraged his friends and political aides to make her feel welcome. “She was someone you had great expectations for and wanted to know because Bill kept talking about her,” recalled Rudy Moore.

  Yet at the same time that Clinton was earnestly recruiting Rodham to his state, he was still involved with the student volunteer, a relationship that had been going on for several months. The tension at campaign headquarters increased considerably when Rodham arrived as people there tried to deal with the situation. Both women seemed on edge. The Arkansas girlfriend would ask people about Hillary: what she was like, and whether Clinton was going to marry her. When she was at headquarters, someone would sneak her out the back door if Rodham was spotted pulling into the driveway. Mary Lee Fray, who liked both women, felt trapped in the middle of the triangle. She remembers times when Clinton wanted her to chaperone the Arkansas girlfriend and make sure that there were no confrontations with Hillary. “Bill would say, ‘Go take her somewhere. Get lost,’” Fray recalled later. “It would put me in a funny position. He’d say, ‘Go do something. Move it. Scoot it.’ He’d get us out of there.” If Clinton had made it clear that Rodham was his only romantic interest, Fray thought, the other woman would have disappeared. But Clinton would not say anything so direct.

  Fayetteville, a university town, was the most culturally liberal enclave in Arkansas, but the mores of the wider Third Congressional District made it politically impractical for Clinton to live with a woman outside of marriage. Rodham took her own place when she arrived. She rented a three-bedroom house, an architectural showpiece replicating a Frank Lloyd Wright design, bow-shaped and glassy, full of odd-shaped rooms, with a large swimming pool in the backyard. The house belonged to Rafael Guzman, who was on temporary leave from the law school to teach in Iowa, where he was soon joined by his wife, Terry Kirkpatrick, who had served with Rodham on the impeachment inquiry staff. The place quickly looked like campaign headquarters, with Clinton signs everywhere.

  To some Arkansans, Rodham seemed too aggressive at first, especially in contrast to Clinton, who was soft and ambiguous. On the opening day of school, when Rodham first walked into the criminal law classroom, Woody Bassett, who was then a first-year student, thought she “looked out of place. She dressed like a throwback to the sixties. There were not many women in the law school. It took a while to adjust to someone with a different accent who was as aggressive as she was.” Some students were intimidated by Rodham’s brilliance, and others, according to Bassett, “downright resented it. People were never indifferent about her. Some of the guys were not used to being taught and led by a strong woman. And there was no question she was a role model for some of the female students.”

  Anyone who entered her classroom expecting her to follow Clinton’s pedagogical style was mistaken. Clinton was diffuse and easygoing. Rodham was precise and demanding. Clinton was amenable to a filibuster, Rodham was less willing to waste time. Clinton rarely confronted students, preferring to engage them in freewheeling conversations. Rodham would come straight at her students with difficult questions. She was more likely than Clinton to offer clear opinions on legal issues and not leave the class hanging, and she had what Bassett thought was an “unusual ability to absorb a huge amount of facts and boil them down to the bottom line.” And unlike Clinton, notorious as the friendliest grader on the faculty, Rodham wrote rigorous exams and was a tough grader. Most members of the law school faculty regarded her as a better professor than Clinton, if not as animated in the lecture hall, more committed to the craft, as demonstrated by her writings in law journals about the rights of children.

  Rodham was approachable but serious, Mort Gitelman thought. “She would not sit for idle chitchat. She was not a chew-the-fat type of person. She was always working on something and wanted to bring the conversation around to what she was working on. She was all business.” During that first semester, along with teaching criminal law, Rodham also became the first director of the University of Arkansas Legal Clinic, in which law students took on needy clients under the supervision of licensed attorneys. Before Rodham arrived, preliminary work on the clinic had left several faculty members frustrated by resistance from the legal establishment and the paperwork demanded by the federal bureaucracy. Gitelman handed Rodham a ten-inch file that needed to be processed to get federal money for the program. He was impressed by how quickly Rodham sorted through the forms and got the money. Burdened as an outsider and a woman in what was then still a clubby male domain, she persuaded local judges and lawyers to endorse the program. She went to the county bar and negotiated approval for indigence guidelines on who could qualify for clinic assistance, in return agreeing that the clinic would take unprofitable criminal case appointments from the local courts. David Newbern, who helped Rodham with the idiosyncrasies of the legal world in Fayetteville, regarded her, above all, as “a prodigious worker.”

  “IF you are looking for a battleground, go outside onto the streets where I grew up. Lift your eyes to the hills of north and west Arkansas! There is a fight in this Third Congressional District which is a clear and unmistakable struggle between what we are for and what we are against. For, in the words of Harry Truman, when you strip away the ‘small talk and double talk, the combination of crafty silence and resounding misrepresentation,’ you find this seat in Congress occupied by one of the strongest supporters of, and apologists for, the abuse of presidential power and policies which have wrecked the economy. Today we must deliberate. Tomorrow we must take out of this hall the will to set things straight. Let us begin!”

  It was at the Democratic state convention in Hot Springs on September 13 that Clinton delivered that fiery oration. He had been building a name for himself for months, and now, as the stretch run of the general election campaign began, party regulars who had considered him a long shot thought it possible that he had a chance of winning. His challenge was the hot race, the only tightly contested match in what was still a one-party state everywhere but in northwest Arkansas. Clinton packed the fall convention, bringing carloads of supporters from Fayetteville and supplementing them with a boisterous hometown contingent. Although he still privately feared that Nixon’s resignation had cut short his chances, he regain
ed some measure of hope the week before the convention when Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon. Hammerschmidt had swiftly tried to reposition himself as more of a Ford man than a Nixon man in the days after the resignation, bringing out newspaper ads that depicted him working closely with Ford during their days together in the House. But no sooner had the ads appeared than Ford’s popularity sank when he pardoned his predecessor.

  Clinton portrayed the pardon as the final dishonorable act of the Watergate scandal. “We have come together in the midst of one of our country’s most difficult periods,” he said. “After two years of turmoil, a president of the United States has resigned his office. His chosen successor, in whom Democrats and Republicans alike had at first placed such hope, has granted a ‘full, free and absolute’ pardon to the fallen president in advance of any charges being filed against him. This pardon has again opened the wounds of Watergate. It has undermined respect for law and order. It has prejudiced pending trials. It has tormented the families of those already in prison for the administration’s political crimes. It is yet another blow to that vast body of law-abiding Americans, whose faith in equal justice under law has been shaken, then repaired, and is now shaken again.”

  The rest of Clinton’s keynote speech was devoted to the economy, his rhetoric more strident and class-conscious than it would later become. He came across as a defender of the middle class and the working class against rapacious corporations and Republican policies. He deplored the “record deficits and recession” brought on by “six long years” of Republican control of the White House. He accused Republicans of keeping “prices high and profits high for the biggest corporations, while trying to hold down minimum wages and telling working people to tighten their belts.” He spoke of a member of a road crew in Scott County, his apocryphal everyman, who told him that working people “want a hand up, not a hand out.” If President Ford “wants to pardon somebody,” he concluded, “he ought to pardon the administration’s economic advisers.”

  Clinton’s principal issues adviser for the fall campaign was Steve Smith, the young turk of the Arkansas legislature who had spent the summer in graduate school at Northwestern University. His return to Fayetteville came shortly before Rodham’s arrival, at once lending the campaign more intellectual weight and making it more chaotic. Smith was a voracious reader who could match Rodham and Clinton’s brainpower, and week by week he grabbed more of the candidate’s time and interest as they developed issues together. “It was wonderful to work issues for the guy,” Smith said later. “Every week I’d spend eighty hours doing research. I’d set up an issue of the week. We’d open Monday with a press conference, lay out our position and a handful of Hammerschmidt votes. I’d brief him on Sunday for the press conference on Monday. He would absorb everything I said, every detail, and draw conclusions and connections that I had missed.”

  The weekly news conferences began the Monday after the state convention and continued through November. At one in Van Buren, Clinton attacked the administration’s agricultural trade policies, saying that wheat exports to the Soviet Union should be restricted and tighter limits should be placed on beef imports. “If we do not reverse these suicidal trends,” he said, “the small, independent farmer will be forced from his land, and large multinational corporate farms will dominate Arkansas and the nation, manipulating the price of food much the same as the giant oil companies do the price of gasoline.” Clinton called on Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture, to “resign and return to the board of directors of Ralston-Purina.”

  Although Clinton was mechanically inept and had no real experience on the farm or in the factory, he now offered himself to the farmers and workers of his district as one of them. His childhood friends from Hot Springs might have snickered at this transformation. Clinton’s potential as a skilled laborer was revealed to them in seventh-grade shop class. The teacher would not let students proceed to more complicated tasks until they had squared a block to his satisfaction. While most of the boys went on to craft breadboards and tables, Clinton spent the entire year trying to square his block. “Bill planed more blocks than any kid in the history of junior high,” according to his classmate Ronnie Cecil. As to his aptitude on the farm, his formative experience there came at age seven when he was bruised and battered by an angry ram that had pinned him to the ground.

  Now, as a candidate, he was the son of soil and toil. It was part of a strategy that had been outlined to Clinton by Jody Powell, an aide to Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia who was heading the Democratic National Committee’s 1974 campaign team. Powell came to Fayetteville to advise the Clinton campaign for a few days in the early fall. Clinton’s aides remember that Powell looked disheveled and “more hippieish” than he would two years later when his boss was running for president. He left behind a seventeen-point memo. Point number seven read: “Find a dramatic way to identify with agricultural interests before [Hammerschmidt] can label you as some sort of ‘pseudo-intellectual liberal professor’ who doesn’t know or care about agriculture.”

  At the same time that Clinton plowed the populist turf, and attacked the corporate mentality of Republicans, he relied heavily on support from the Tyson family, owners of Tyson Foods Inc. Don Tyson, the chairman, was an eccentric, hardworking, hard-playing character who would later redesign his corporate suite in the shape of the White House’s Oval Office. He wore the khaki work uniform he required of all his employees, including the top executives. He had shiny doorknobs in the corporate suite made in the shape of eggs. He was also a yellow dog Democrat who had long ties to the recently defeated Fulbright and most other leading politicians in the state. His chief outside legal counsel was Jim Blair, who had been Fulbright’s campaign manager and counsel to the state Democratic party and was one of Clinton’s friends and advisers.

  Tyson Foods was aggressively buying out competitors in the early 1970s on its way to becoming the leading poultry firm in the nation. But 1974 was a difficult year, the only one in its history when the company lost money, going back to 1936 when John Tyson loaded five hundred spring chickens into crates and trucked them up to Chicago where he sold them for a $235 profit. Don Tyson, the founder’s son, placed much of the blame for the slump on the Republican administration in Washington, charging that huge grain sales to the Soviet Union had caused feed prices to rise sharply, destroying the poultry market. The Third Congressional District was home to Tyson’s corporate headquarters, based in Springdale, as well as to hundreds of small farmers who raised chickens for the company. The growers were largely dependent on Tyson Foods and suffered when the company suffered. Clinton emphasized their plight, rather than the Tyson operation’s annual loss, in his speeches and commercials. One of his radio spots featured an announcer who sounded like Johnny Cash, inquiring, “Pay too much for greens ’n beans? Forget what pork ’n beefsteak means? Push Earl Butz away from the trough!”

  Don Tyson stayed in the shadows of the campaign, but would be called in occasionally by Blair when fund-raising problems arose. Clinton would meet Tyson and other major financial patrons in the back room of an old stone house up the road from headquarters, an unmarked restaurant that specialized in thick steaks and saltine crackers with picante sauce. Don Tyson’s stepbrother, Randal Tyson, spent much of his time at Clinton headquarters during the final months. “He busted his butt,” recalled Paul Fray. “Randal wanted Clinton to win that race something fierce.” The Tysons also donated a campaign telephone bank which operated out of an apartment near the university.

  ONE way to catch fish, according to an old Arkansas folk tale, is for people to wade into a stream and kick their feet around the bottom until the water becomes so disturbed and muddy that the fish rise to the top. The story serves as an allegory for politics, which in Arkansas is both a popular sport and a muddy one. Bill Clinton was a fish swimming in muddy water from the beginning of his political career. Even then, in his first Arkansas campaign, rumors swirled furiously around him.

  One rumor, whic
h came to be known as “The Boy in the Tree,” or “The Man in the Tree,” was the easiest to disprove and yet the most persistent. In the fall of 1969, President Nixon, an inveterate sports fan, had traveled to Fayetteville to attend a football game between the Arkansas Razorbacks and Texas Longhorns, two of the nation’s best college teams. The lasting photographic symbol of that Saturday afternoon in Fayetteville was a picture of a protester sitting in a tree holding a sign urging Nixon to go home, which was later reprinted in the college yearbook. The young man’s face was not clearly identifiable. He resembled the Bill Clinton of 1969 only in that he had long curly hair and a beard. Brenda Blagg, who covered Nixon’s visit for the student newspaper, was standing under the tree that day and knew the protester, a familiar campus character who was “certainly not Bill Clinton.” At the time of Nixon’s visit, Clinton was against the war and no fan of Nixon’s, but it was impossible for him to have been in a tree in Fayetteville. He was at Oxford, beginning his second year as a Rhodes Scholar.

  Yet five years later, during the congressional campaign, the word went out that Clinton was the boy in the tree. A woman called several newspapers in the district and, without identifying herself, said, “We’re trying to get a copy of that picture when Bill Clinton was sitting in the tree. Do you happen to have that picture in your files?” At political rallies, unmarked handbills were distributed showing the tree picture and no explicit mention of Clinton, simply the inference in a question: “Do You Want This to Be Your Congressman?” The rumor was accompanied by whispers that Clinton had been a draft dodger, though his letter to Colonel Holmes and other ROTC records had not surfaced, and no one made the draftdodging charges in public. Many of Clinton’s aides noticed a level of vitriol in the attacks on Clinton that exceeded even the rough norms of Arkansas poli-tics. “This was his first race, he had no political history to speak of, yet the level of feeling for and against him was so intense,” recalled Doug Wallace. “It was amazing to me. There was something in his personality and style that engendered that kind of passion on the part of people who wanted to keep him from being elected.”