Clinton reacted to these attacks with varying degrees of righteous anger. He exploded once at Lady, the candidate of the religious right, saying that Lady’s “religious convictions tell him it is wrong to lie, but he does it anyway.” Another time he offered an emotional defense of Rodham. “If people knew how old-fashioned she was in every conceivable way,” he said. “She’s just a hard-working, no-nonsense, no frills, intelligent girl who had done well, who doesn’t see any sense to extramarital sex, who doesn’t care much for drink, who’s witty and sharp without being a stick in the mud. She’s just great.”
But in private, Clinton worried little about his primary, which his polls showed he had clinched. He busied himself with another political role as back room strategist for Pryor’s race in the Senate primary. He confided to a few friends and advisers that he wanted Pryor to defeat Jim Guy Tucker, whom he viewed as his main competition as the rising star of state Democratic politics. During Morris’s frequent trips to Little Rock in the spring of 1978, he later recalled, he and Clinton would spend a few minutes talking about the governor’s race, then spend hours plotting how Pryor could beat Tucker. Morris noticed something extraordinary about their discussions. They talked not like consultant and client, but like two consultants. He came to regard Clinton as “a highly sophisticated colleague” in the profession.
As Morris had predicted in his early polls for Clinton, Pryor proved to be vulnerable. On the night that Clinton swept the gubernatorial primary with nearly 60 percent of the vote, Pryor barely survived the Senate primary and was forced into a runoff with Tucker. Clinton, according to Morris, was becoming “increasingly frustrated with the Pryor campaign.” He complained that Pryor was “being too nice a guy and wasn’t aggressive enough in the campaign.” For the two-week runoff, Tucker began a media campaign based on the theme that Pryor might be a nice guy to go fishing with, but he was not an effective politician who could solve the state’s and nation’s pressing problems. Clinton, the back room political consultant, spent hours devising a response that would show Pryor’s strength. When the firemen in Arkansas had threatened to strike, Pryor had said that he would call out the National Guard to replace them. He had acted boldly and decisively in a situation where another governor in another state had not and some fires had burned out of control. They could make an ad showing David Pryor standing tall. Clinton wrote out the ad copy and gave it to Dick Morris, who revised it and took it to Pryor, who authorized it.
Pryor felt uneasy about this outside consultant Clinton had brought into the campaign. He had rejected Morris’s services earlier, and was only using him now because Clinton insisted on it. Pryor’s wife, Barbara, found Morris especially disagreeable and banned him from the Governor’s Mansion. She thought he was too negative, too much of an operator. Clinton had no such qualms, at least not during the election season. His theory of politics, he told Morris, was that you do what you have to do to get elected. Pryor won the runoff.
Clinton still had a general election to win. The Republicans had put up an opponent this time, unlike the attorney general’s race two years earlier. But it was not an even match. Lynn Lowe, a GOP official and farmer from Texarkana, was underfinanced and unknown. So confident were Clinton and his top campaign aides, Steve Smith and Rudy Moore, that they began preparing for his first year as governor. They were determined, Moore said, to “define and set the agenda for the legislature in 1979.”
WITH Bill Clinton it is often tempting, but usually misleading, to try to separate the good from the bad, to say that the part of him that is indecisive, too eager to please and prone to deception, is more revealing of the inner man than the part of him that is indefatigable, intelligent, empathetic, and self-deprecating. They co-exist. There is a similar balance to his life’s progression. In his worst times, one can see the will to recover and the promise of redemption. In his best times, one can see the seeds of disaster.
The final months of 1978 reflected the second of those two conditions. He was on the edge of glory. At the early age of thirty-two, he was the governor-apparent of Arkansas. He had a determined wife and a finely tuned political machine and an army of friends. He had come further, faster in the political world than any member of his generation. And yet it was in those promising days of 1978 that Clinton perplexed his aides by hanging out in racy nightclubs surrounded by admiring women. It was then that he and Rodham signed the first papers in a land deal along the White River in the Ozark hills. It was then that Rodham entered the risky livestock commodities trading market and made a huge profit in a way that would later be questioned. And it was then that Clinton was confronted with accusations that he had dodged the draft.
Of those events, only the draft issue was played out in public at the time. The others seemed of less consequence then. Not that the draft story loomed particularly large either. It was not so much a crisis as a two-day problem, raised and dealt with and quickly forgotten—but not forever gone. In the final week of the campaign, Billy G. Geren, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, held a news conference on the steps of the state Capitol in which he accused Clinton of being a draft dodger. Geren charged that Clinton had received a draft deferment in 1969 by agreeing to join the University of Arkansas ROTC, but had then reneged on his promise and returned to Oxford University. The lieutenant colonel, who was accompanied to the press conference by a top aide to the Republican gubernatorial candidate, laid out the case. Clinton easily rebuffed the charge by offering a fuzzy response. He claimed that he had never received a draft deferment because he had canceled the agreement with the ROTC and reentered the draft pool before a deferment could be granted. When reporters asked Colonel Eugene Holmes, the former head of the ROTC program, about the incident, Holmes said that he could not remember the Clinton case. With no documents to substantiate either side, the issue disappeared.
Geren, who had served on the University of Arkansas ROTC staff from 1972 to 1976, was closer to making a strong case than Clinton or the press realized. He had heard about the letter that Clinton had written to Colonel Holmes from Oxford in which Clinton thanked the officer for saving him from the draft. But Geren could not find a copy of the letter. Ed Howard, who had been the drill sergeant on the ROTC staff and had left the service to sell real estate in Malvern, recalled that Geren called him at home late one night shortly before the press conference. “He told me they were looking into Clinton dodging the draft,” Howard said. “He knew that I knew about the Clinton file and the letter. He was trying to get me to help them. He wanted me to tell the press that I knew about it.”
Howard refused. He was a Clinton supporter by then and did not think the draft should be an issue in the governor’s race. But the day after the press conference, when he read in the papers that Clinton denied ever receiving a draft deferment, Howard felt the same way that he had back in 1969 when he first heard about the letter to Colonel Holmes. “I was disappointed with Bill,” he recalled. “And angry—again.”
• • •
PROMISE, pain, an augury of future trouble—they were all there again on election night in 1978.
The promise was evident in Clinton’s overwhelming win. He swept the state with 63 percent of the vote and became the youngest governor in the United States in four decades.
The pain came five minutes before the first evening news report on the election. Jim Ranchino, Clinton’s friend and in-state pollster, who also served as an analyst for KATV in Little Rock, was exuberant that his numbers showed young Clinton scoring a resounding victory. An ebullient bear of a man, Ranchino had been slowed by what he thought was the flu that day but was eager to get on the air so that he could discuss the rise of Arkansas’ bright new star. He never made it to the microphone. As he was walking up the stairs toward his seat in the studio, he was felled by a massive, fatal heart attack.
The omen of future trouble came in a congratulatory note from President Carter, who wrote to Governor-elect Clinton: “You and I will succeed in meeting the goals f
or our country by working closely together to serve those whom we represent.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
BILL CLINTON WAS ensconced in the back seat of a limousine transporting him in unaccustomed luxury through the ice-slicked streets of Little Rock. At his side was Dave Matter, an old friend from his undergraduate days at Georgetown. Matter had been the campaign manager for Clinton’s first tough defeat, when he lost the student council presidency because his classmates had grown bored with his smooth patter and his ingratiating manner with the school establishment. Now, on this January night twelve years later, the two were reunited for Clinton’s inauguration as the youngest governor in the United States since before World War II. As they rode from one event to the next, Clinton turned to Matter and professed surprise at what had become of his life. “Matter,” he said, in his soft, hoarse voice. “Did you ever think it would come to this?” For Matter, who had been invited into the limousine in one of Clinton’s characteristic share-the-moment impulses, as for scores of other friends from various chapters of Clinton’s life who converged on Little Rock for his ascension to the governorship, the answer was … yes, of course. Yes, of course, he would be Governor Clinton or Senator Clinton some day. And yes, of course, that might only be the beginning.
This first inaugural, for the friends of Clinton and Rodham, had the aura of a generational rite. From all sections of the country they made the pilgrimage to gray, freezing Little Rock. They were there to witness the coming of age of one of their own, the first in their class to reach such prominence on the political stage. Matter and Tommy Caplan represented the Georgetown crowd. Betsey Wright, who had worked with Clinton and Rodham during the McGovern campaign in Texas, came out from Washington. Fred Kammer and Alston Johnson, who first encountered Clinton when they were pro-civil rights senators at Boys Nation, arrived from Louisiana. From the Yale Law School group came Carolyn Ellis from Mississippi and Steven Cohen and Greg Craig from Washington. Carolyn Yeldell, Clinton’s high school friend, returned from Indiana to sing Verdi and Mozart arias in the Capitol rotunda. She was Carolyn Staley now, married to an art teacher, and ready to move home, believing that “this was a good time for the family to be aligned with the Clinton administration.”
Along with these generational cohorts, the inaugural congregation included a colorful mix of elders. Don Tyson strutted down to the state capital to host a pre-inaugural bash at the Camelot Hotel. From Washington came Sara Ehrman, Rodham’s landlady during her stay in Washington for the Watergate inquiry, who five years earlier had warned that moving to provincial Arkansas would be a grave mistake. Arriving by private jet from Norton, Virginia, were Carl McAfee and Charlie Daniels, the gung-ho lawyer and patriotic plumber who had encountered Clinton during his journey to Moscow eight years earlier when they were seeking the release of American POWs from North Vietnam. McAfee kept teasing Rodham about not changing her name. Daniels, a University of Tennessee football fanatic who owned an orange limousine that he would ride to Volunteer football games, showed up at the Diamonds and Denim ball in his bright orange tuxedo, an outfit that delighted Clinton’s mother.
All of them traveled to Little Rock with the notion that the rise of Clinton and Rodham transcended that time and place. At a party the night before the swearing in, Clinton strolled up to Steven Cohen and asked, “Well, what do you think?” Cohen was an idealist, going back to his days in the antiwar movement and the McCarthy campaign, but his idealism dissolved into disillusionment when people he believed in let him down or when he thought the country was losing its way. He came to Little Rock in a dispirited mood, worn down by the controversies surrounding his job in the human rights office at the State Department and by the increasing disarray of the Carter administration. But none of that weary cynicism seemed evident in Clinton’s Arkansas. “I’ll tell you what I think,” Cohen said to Clinton. “I feel two emotions in this room that I hadn’t experienced in a long time—pride and hope.”
The next day, Cohen and Greg Craig, now an attorney at the Williams & Connally law firm in Washington, stood side by side listening to Clinton’s inaugural address, and were transfixed by the rhythmic cadence with which he laid out the credo of their generation. “For as long as I can remember,” Clinton said, “I have believed passionately in the cause of equal opportunity, and I will do what I can to advance it. For as long as I can remember, I have deplored the arbitrary and abusive exercise of power by those in authority, and I will do what I can to prevent it…. For as long as I can remember, I have loved the land, air and water of Arkansas, and I will do what I can to protect them. For as long as I can remember, I have wished to ease the burdens of life for those who, through no fault of their own, are old or weak or needy, and I will try to help them.” Cohen then heard his own words come back to him. “Last evening, after our Gala, a friend of mine from Washington who travels this country and speaks to many groups in many places, said that he felt in that crowd two emotions which are not found in other places today. Pride and hope. Pride and hope. With those two qualities, we can go a long way….” At that moment, it seemed to Cohen and Craig that their old Yale Law friend deserved his status as a generational leader.
Craig returned to Washington “absolutely euphoric.” Later he would say that he could not think of a political event that had excited him more than Clinton’s first inaugural.
THE young governor arrived with an ambitious agenda. An in-house study showed that he had made fifty-three specific promises before he took office. Two promises were unmet on the first day. He was so eager to get going that he promised that he would have a budget summary book on the desk of every legislator for the opening day of the General Assembly and that he would have all his bills drafted by that day as well. Both were late. When the budget summary did appear, it was so thick that some legislators joked they would strain their backs lifting it. Clinton assumed, because of his overwhelming numerical victory in the election, that he had a mandate to transform the state. Creating new departments in energy and economic development, revamping the rural health care system, reorganizing school districts, reordering the education system—he wanted to do it all in two years. His state of the state address was so detailed that it contained a section on the length of time landlords could hold security deposits from renters. Old-line legislators looked at the legislative package with glazed eyes.
Clinton and his top assistants bubbled over with ideas that they had been collecting from progressive policy thinkers around the nation, from preschool programs to solar energy projects. It was what one adviser called “a pent-up idealistic agenda.” But the young governor was also conscious of the need to be perceived as a cautious spender. Most of the programs were crammed into the first budget as demonstration projects,with little money behind them. With his new fascination for polls, Clinton asked Dick Morris to survey Arkansas voters on the dozens of ideas that he had put into the budget, and then rank them in popularity and construct an overall theme. Morris conducted the poll, but could not find a theme. “He was left with a program that was thoroughly admirable but indescribable,” Morris recalled. “There was a bit of everything. Like a kid in a candy store, he wanted to do it all.”
Along with his diffuse experimentation, Clinton chose one larger issue to define himself: roads. He used as his impetus a legislative report that had declared the state highway system a disaster in need of $3.3 billion worth of improvements. Better roads were essential to the economic future of the state, Clinton said. In private, he also expressed the belief that a major roads program would show that this Yale Law grad and Oxonian understood rural Arkansas. Before presenting his highway proposal, Clinton directed Morris to conduct polls on the acceptability of various taxes to fund it. His revenue specialists told him that the quickest way to raise large sums was to increase the annual car license fees. His program people told him that the largest burden of the road improvements should be placed on eighteen-wheel trucks, which were causing most of the roa
d damage. Morris’s polling showed that 53 percent of the people would support an increase in the car license fees to build better roads, while 37 percent opposed such a tax. Clinton thought the poll meant a majority would support him if he raised the fees.
The administration drafted a proposal that placed most of the tax burden on heavy trucks but also raised car license fees, basing the rate of increase on the value of each car. The plan immediately encountered intense opposition from two powerful lobbies, the trucking industry and the poultry industry, a major user of trucks, both already upset at Clinton for backing away from a campaign promise to increase the weight allowed for trucks driving in Arkansas from 73,000 pounds to 80,000 pounds, the weight allowed in several neighboring states. Several trucking firms threatened to leave Arkansas. The poultry industry, which had its operatives as far inside the legislative process as possible—its paid lobbyists were elected members of the legislature—stymied the administration bill in committee. Determined to find middle ground, Clinton signed off on a compromise that angered all sides. The major tax burden was shifted from trucks to cars and pickups, but the trucking and poultry industries remained upset that they were hit with higher taxes and hammered at Clinton for the rest of the term trying to get him to push for repeal. Meanwhile, the car license increase was altered so that it was based on weight rather than value. Owners of new, smaller, lighter, and more expensive cars would be asked to pay less to renew their licenses than poorer citizens who drove around in heavy old clunkers. This was not a politically wise concept in a rural state full of jalopies and old pickups.
First In His Class Page 50
