There was, in Clinton’s case, often a fine line between self-absorption and humility. At any hour of day or night he would flip through his bulging file of index cards, dialing friends from around the country for long talks and confessionals. He had blown it, he would say. He had his career exactly where he wanted it, and he had blown it. In grocery stores, he cornered friends and asked what he had done wrong. He took solace wherever he could find it. One day he invited a group of Pentecostal ministers in to pray with him. He called himself “about as popular as the plague.”
During a trip to Fayetteville, Clinton made a guest appearance at Diane Blair’s class on politics and literature. He analyzed some of the more complex and compelling political characters in literature, including Willie Stark, the corrupt, populist southern governor in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, and Pietro Spina, the disillusioned hero of Ignazio Silone’s anti-Fascist novel Bread and Wine. He also discussed several biographies that had helped shape his perspective, including ones of Lincoln, Hitler, and Churchill. Political leaders, he said, were usually a combination of darkness and light. The darkness of insecurity, depression, family disorder. In great leaders, the light overcame the darkness. Near the end of class, one student asked why, given all the choices open to him, Clinton had committed himself to the political life. His response revealed that his urge was so deep and strong that he never saw it as a choice. He framed his answer in the language of his mother, a woman who loved nothing better than to watch the races of her thoroughbreds: the ponies at Oaklawn and her son Bill the candidate.
Why politics? Clinton was asked.
“It’s the only track I ever wanted to run on,” he replied.
THE only track….
When Billie Carr, the tough old Godmother of Texas liberals who had trained Clinton in the ways of Lone Star politics in 1972, heard that he had lost, she thought it was “the end of his dream.” Then he called her one night and launched into one of his patented, breathless assessments of what went wrong.
“What now?” Carr asked when he was through.
“Well, Billie,” he said. “I’m gonna start working for the next time.”…
Woody Bassett, a young Fayetteville lawyer who had taken classes from Clinton and Rodham when they taught at Arkansas, was heading toward his seat at Razorback Stadium on a bitterly cold Saturday afternoon a few weeks after the election. Through the din of the college football crowd, Bassett heard someone shouting his name: “Woody! Hey, Woody! Bassett!” He turned around. There was Bill Clinton, running toward him. It was the first time he had seen Clinton since his defeat.
“Governor,” he said, “I’m awfully disappointed that you lost.”
“Tell you what,” Clinton said, pointing his oversized index finger at Bassett’s chest. “I’m gonna run for governor again. I’m gonna get that job back. I want you to help me.”…
Clinton called Rudy Moore out to the mansion. He and his wife had been brainstorming. “Here’s an idea, let’s talk about it,” Hillary Rodham said, as Clinton and Moore shot a casual game of pool. The idea was to call a special session of the legislature to repeal the unpopular increase in car license fees which had played a role in his defeat. Frank White would repeal the fee increases as soon as he got in office, Clinton said. “If it’s gonna happen anyway, why should that guy get the credit?” Moore argued against the special session, saying it was too late to placate the general public and that all this would do was rile the highway lobby, which was already planning how to spend the money to build more roads. Moore won the argument, but he and Randy White, who was also at the mansion, came away with one overriding thought: Clinton was already running for election.
The only track…
THE comeback began with two telephone calls. Rodham called Dick Morris again and said he had to return to Little Rock immediately to begin working on the next campaign. And Clinton called Betsey Wright. His political life was a mess, he told her. His staff was demoralized and despondent. Some of them were mad at him. He felt, to some degree, that he had let them down, and vice versa. Hillary had tried to make it clear to the staff that there was a lot of “cleaning up” to do before they turned things over to Frank White. She had assumed the role of bad cop to get that word across, but it had only ended in a harsh exchange with Rudy Moore. “The problem here is that these people have to look for other jobs,” Moore had explained, to which Hillary had replied, “Well, that may be true, but we’ve got to get this goddamn work done!” But Clinton did not feel comfortable turning to his staff for much help, which he needed immediately.
He told Wright that he needed an outsider to come down to Little Rock to gather all of his records and sort through the substance and the remains of his career. He needed a trainer to get him back on the track. Wright, who was between jobs after having spent most of the seventies as an organizer in the women’s political movement in Washington, was intrigued. She had known Clinton and Rodham since the McGovern campaign, and she felt both an intuitive understanding of him and an impulse to help him. She was, in a sense, almost part of the family. Within days of taking the call, Wright was on the job. She slept in the guest house at the mansion at first, until Tom Williamson, Clinton’s Oxford friend, arrived for a buckup visit, and they moved her to the basement, where she slept amid the sea of files. She worked day and night and on weekends, assisted by Gloria Cabe, the Clinton campaign worker and former Little Rock representative, who had also been defeated that year. On Thanksgiving Day, Clinton and Rodham took baby Chelsea with them down to Virginia’s house in Hot Springs, leaving Wright behind. They forgot to bring her back any leftovers.
Some of the raw political data Wright and Cabe sorted through had been computerized over the years, but most of the essential information about his political network of supporters remained on loose slips of paper or on three-by-five-inch index cards, now totaling more than ten thousand, that had been maintained by Clinton and his aides over the years, and were stored in shoe boxes and old wooden library card catalogue files. If Clinton was to rebuild his political career, these cards were the bricks with which he would do it. Each card recorded a piece of his history and reflected his relentless campaign style. On the top right corner was the county where the subject of the card lived, or, if the name was from out of state, the era in which that person came into Clinton’s life: Georgetown, Oxford, Yale, McGovern campaign. Running down the left-hand side of the card were dates, starting with the first time Clinton had met the person and every important contact they had had since. In the middle were names, telephone numbers, addresses, sometimes contribution amounts. Another row of dates noted when that person had received a letter from Clinton or his aides known as a GTMY: for Glad to Meet You.
THE youngest former governor in American history left the mansion one morning in January 1981 with his wife and daughter and moved to Midland Avenue on the near west side, to a yellow frame house tucked under the trees, with a wraparound porch and a carport. They lined the walls with built-in bookcases. In an unlikely binge of consumerism, Clinton went on a shopping spree, buying kitschy gingerbread pieces and garish knick-knacks and gargantuan German furniture. Hillary would come home from work and sigh, “Oh, Bill’s been shopping again!” They hired a nurse from the former mansion staff to take care of Chelsea. Clinton went off to work every day at the law firm of Wright, Lindsey & Jennings in the Worthen Bank Building, where he held an office and the title “Of Counsel.”
He pretended that he was enjoying this new private life, but his friends and associates could see that he hated it. He had to worry about things that had not concerned him before, from laundry to baby-sitters. He looked pathetic and out of place in the law office, thought Dick Morris, who often visited him there on political missions. “Everything about it smacked of penance and defeat,” Morris recalled. “Everything about it was ‘This is what I’m doing because I screwed up.ߠThe image that stays in my mind is of this tall guy, folded into a chair, stuffed underneath a small des
k in a small room with the walls crowding him closely, and having to go out and search for someone in the steno pool to do his work, and just being incredibly oversized for the environment in which he was cast. He would very often be soulful: ‘Gee, do you think I can come back? Do you think I’ve had it?’ He would talk about the great people who got voted out of office. He was like a patient afflicted with cancer wondering if he had any chance of survival.”
Just as Clinton had to find his way through the psychological debris of defeat, so, too, did Rodham. She had not expected to be the wife of a former politician so soon. For Arkansans to reject her was one thing; but for them to reject Clinton, whom she had regarded as the state’s favorite son, seemed unthinkable. In a letter to Don Jones, her former Methodist youth minister who was now teaching theology in New Jersey, she tried to sort out what had happened. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the irrationality of politics and why people become so irrational,” she wrote. “I remember once talking to you when I was in high school about a relative of mine who every now and then became caught up in an irrational mood, and how you put it in such simple terms and said, ‘Have you ever seen anyone lose their temper? And how people can lose control of their good sense in moments of passion?’ And you helped me in understanding.”
Nowhere in the letter did Rodham mention what had happened in the election. Years later, rereading that letter, Jones pieced together what was going through her mind. In bringing back his old advice, she had reached a classically Rodhamesque conclusion. She considered herself rational and her logic told her that her husband should have been reelected. Therefore his rejection was an act of irrationality inflamed by passion.
Rodham offered a more political analysis of her husband’s defeat at a conference in late February at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. Her performance there was characterized by the Arkansas Gazette as “semi-gracious” but “totally spunky and eloquent.” The losing campaign’s first problem, she asserted, was that too many Clinton supporters thought it would be an easy election and were not as energized as they should have been. Furthermore, she said, “a political campaign has come down to a thirty-second war on television”—and the Clinton organization lost that war badly to Frank White. Their television commercials were ineffective, she said, and they reacted too slowly to White’s negative attack in which he used grainy black and white film of the Cuban refugees rioting at Fort Chaffee to portray Clinton as an ineffective leader. When she first saw the Cuban refugee ad, Rodham thought, “I can’t believe anyone will believe this.” She considered it racist, noting that all the rioters in the film were black. Only too late, she said, did they realize that “it was not fair or accurate, but it was very effective.”
Many of her friends from outside Arkansas were concerned about Rodham’s well-being in the aftermath of the election. Did she feel stuck in that remote place with an embittered husband whose ambitions had been stymied? Fred Altshuler decided to check up on her. “I knew what she had gone through just to go to Arkansas in the first place,” Altshuler recalled. “I wanted to see how she was doing.” He ventured out to Little Rock from San Francisco and slept on their couch at the Midland Avenue house. After hanging out for a few days, he decided that he had been too apprehensive about his friend’s trauma. He visited Hillary and Bill at their law offices. She seemed engrossed in her work and Clinton bored by his. Altshuler talked about referring some cases to Clinton, “but he seemed much more interested in politics.” They held a large dinner party at their house and Betsey Wright was there along with several professors—Arkansas people all talking Arkansas politics for hours on end. Hillary was right in the middle of the conversation.
She seemed perfectly at home there, Altshuler decided, more comfortable than when she had visited him in San Francisco and defended Jimmy Carter at a dinner party full of liberals. Hillary, Altshuler concluded, “was as much into the Arkansas kind of situation as Bill, which was the thing I had been curious about. I didn’t know how she would react, having lost. She seemed to be doing fine.”
As the weary winter dissolved into spring, Rodham spent some of her spare time planting a flowerbed in her yard and asked for advice on colors of lawn furniture. Clinton once called a friend and proudly boasted that he had just finished cleaning the kitchen: “It’s spick and span,” he said. But these were only random scenes of domestic bliss. The Clinton and Rodham relationship was rarely without tension, and in the months after the defeat the tension had heightened. Clinton seemed the more unhappy and distracted. One Saturday morning a friend stopped by the house and found him in the den, playing on the floor with Chelsea. Rodham was in the kitchen. As he smiled and laughed with his one-year-old daughter, Clinton sang softly in the lilt of a gentle lullaby, but loud enough for his guest to hear: “I want a div-or-or-or-orce. I want a div-or-or-or-orce.”
NEVER fond of the deskbound life, Clinton spent several months in 1981 traveling the state, running as long and as hard as a noncandidate could run. Randy White, who had not found other employment, often served as his driver and travel aide. They would take White’s Thunderbird, and scrounge around for gasoline money and a quarter to buy the Gazette. Betsey Wright, from her post outside Clinton’s law office door, was running the show, setting up appointments at the same time that she was overseeing the transfer of his index cards onto a new computer system, bringing his political operation into the high-tech era. High school graduations, community meetings on toxic waste dumps—Clinton would go anywhere and talk to anyone who would listen to him. When asked pointblank, “Are you running for governor again?” he would demur, saying he was still weighing his options. Then, back in the car with White, he chortled, “Man, this thing is taking off Talk up the rematch! Talk up the rematch!”
The traveling show of 1981 provided another chapter for Clinton’s Close Calls in Cars. He and Randy White were in Fayetteville one morning for a commencement ceremony. As usual, Clinton chatted at length after the program, so that by the time he and White got back in the T-bird they were late for the next appointment, a graduation speech at the small town of Fifty-Six in north-central Arkansas. White’s best-case scenario was that they could make it fifty minutes late. “Let’s do it!” Clinton said. They took off, laughing and telling stories. Beer cans from a six-pack White had emptied the night before were rattling around on the floor of the car. The speedometer soon reached one hundred. Clinton was into a nap. White looked out the side and noticed that he had whooshed past a parked state trooper. He hit Clinton on the leg and said, “Uh, guess what, I just passed a state trooper!”
By the time the trooper caught up to them, Clinton and White were standing casually outside their car, parked on the shoulder of the road. “The trooper got that ‘Oh, shit’ expression on his face when he saw who it was,” White later recalled. Clinton coolly gave him instructions. “We’re trying to get to Fifty-Six and we need you to radio ahead and let them know we’ll be late.” Then they jumped back in the car and took off. Perhaps the trooper had forgotten that Clinton was no longer governor. In any case, not only did he spare them a ticket, but he radioed ahead as ordered. By the time the Thunderbird reached the school at Fifty-Six, the whole town was waiting. A special parking place had been set aside right in front. White’s engine was smoking. Clinton was pumped by the journey and the crowd. He jumped out of the car—and a few beer cans fell out with him and rolled and clanged down the hill. They loved him in Fifty-Six.
Now that Clinton needed friends wherever he could find them, his on-and-off relationship with labor was on again. He visited with Bill Becker and other state labor leaders several times, expressing regret that he had not worked more closely with them in the past. The AFL-CIO summer convention in Hot Springs received his denunciation of Frank White’s anti-labor record with shouts and several standing ovations, and Becker followed his speech by saying, “I suspect that that goodbye is only temporary.” The labor movement contributed money to the fund that paid Betsey Wright’s salary and his ex
ploratory campaign work. The Democratic National Committee also helped him stay active by giving him a part-time mission as the head of the state and local elections effort, a job that could pay for some of his travel until he officially began his own state election campaign.
In his travels for the DNC, Clinton brought with him the lessons learned from his loss. The main tactical lesson, he thought, concerned how to respond to negative advertising. Since his first campaign on behalf of Judge Frank Holt in the 1966 gubernatorial primary, Clinton had remembered Holt’s assertion that the public expected more of its candidates than to respond in kind to mudslinging from the other side. After what Frank White did to him with the Cuban refugee ads, Clinton finally became convinced that Judge Holt’s credo was noble but naive and ultimately fatal. At a DNC election workshop in Des Moines, Iowa, Clinton delineated his new policy. “When someone is beating you over the head with a hammer, don’t sit there and take it,” he said. “Take out a meat cleaver and cut off their hand.”
Doug Wallace was in the luncheon audience that day when Clinton let loose. In the years that he had worked with Clinton, first as his press secretary in the 1974 congressional race and later as executive director of the Arkansas Democratic party, Wallace had heard many colorful comments from his friend, but none quite so ferocious and bloody as that. Yes, Clinton was eager to please; yes, he was known as a conciliator; no, he had no combat experience; no, he had never shown much skill with tools or cutlery; no, he was not the brutish sort; yes, he often seemed conflict averse—and yet he had a peculiar attraction to violent figures of speech. “Take out a meat cleaver and cut off their hand,” Bill Clinton had said.
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