First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Hillary dismissed those who questioned her actions as quibblers who did not appreciate that what she was doing was for the greater good. She framed her actions in moral terms. Beyond all the particulars, in the grand scheme of right and wrong, she felt with almost religious conviction that she was on the side of right. Don Jones, the Drew University theology professor who had been her religious mentor during her youth in Park Ridge, and who admired her greatly, got into an argument with her during a visit to Little Rock. They were discussing the works of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and soon enough Jones found himself disputing Hillary’s contention that some causes were closer to the will of God than others. “I said, ‘I don’t think you can equate any cause, however good, to the will of God,’ ” Jones recalled. “I began a discourse on the dangers of idolatry and quoted from Lincoln’s second inaugural address—the North thinks God is on its side, the South thinks God is on its side, but the Almighty has his own purposes.”

  RELIGION played an increasingly important role in the lives of the Clintons through the eighties, the most demanding decade of their partnership. They came out of vastly different religious cultures and attended separate churches on Sunday, yet Hillary, the United Methodist, and Bill, the Southern Baptist, both found that faith eased the burden of their high-profile lives, sometimes offering solace and escape from the contentious world of politics, at other times providing theological support for their political choices. Their religious evolutions were similar, reflecting a generational trend: churchgoing was an essential part of their early adolescent years, less apparent during their late teens and twenties, and more vital again as they moved through their thirties into mature parenthood and middle age. The intensity of their faith seemed to increase in proportion to their growing ambitions and responsibilities in careers where the rewards of adulation and accomplishment were counterbalanced by the strains of compromise and criticism.

  Hillary Clinton seemed to fit her religion and her church so well that one of her ministers called her “a model of Methodism.” She was, in fact, the human model and inspiration for her husband’s emerging political theme of opportunity and responsibility, which she traced back to the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, an eighteenth-century Anglican priest who mixed social reform with evangelical piety. “As a member of the British Parliament, he spoke out for the poor at a time when their lives were being transformed by far-reaching industrial and economic changes,” she said in a speech explaining why she was a Methodist. “He spent the rest of his life evangelizing among the same people he had spoken up for in Parliament. He preached a gospel of social justice, demanding as determinedly as ever that society do right by all its people. But he also preached a gospel of personal responsibility, asking every man and woman to take responsibility for their own lives … and cultivate the habits that would make them productive.”

  Hillary’s church in downtown Little Rock, First United Methodist, was dominated by productive, achievement-oriented professionals with an interest in modest social reform. It seemed to have a special attraction for lawyers: there were seventy-six in the membership, including many of the leading legal lights in the city. The local bar association held its meetings at the church every month. From its earliest days, United Methodist had played a benevolent function in the community. It sponsored a home for unwed mothers at the turn of the century, and later opened a major child development center and launched the first telephone crisis hotline service in Little Rock. Hillary donated funds for the child care center, served on the administrative board of the church, performed free legal work for the Methodist Church in Arkansas, and traveled the state giving speeches on the personal meaning of Methodism.

  In those speeches, she would talk about John Wesley and Methodist history, about her church youth group experiences in Park Ridge, about the balance between personal and social behavior, and finally about her personal relationship with God. Somewhere in her speech she would recite her favorite exhortation from Wesley: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” Yet at the core of her belief, thought one of her ministers at United Methodist, Reverend Ed Matthews, was a personal need as strong or stronger than the social commitment. “One of her favorite thoughts,” Matthews later reflected, “was that the goal of life is to restore what has been lost, to find oneness with God, and until we find this we are lonely.”

  It could be said that Bill Clinton also turned to religion in search of something that had been lost: a father.

  His church was Immanuel Baptist, an imposing, rectangular shrine of gold and tan that occupied two full city blocks, standing alone on a hill at Tenth and Bishop, looming above the Capitol and the workday world of Little Rock. It was the largest church in Arkansas, with more than four thousand members and a statewide television audience for the live broadcast of the eleven o’clock Sunday services. The differences in the Clintons’ churches were as obvious as Hillary’s midwestern reserve and Bill’s unabashed southern manner. Hillary, as Reverend Matthews once said, was “not going to tote her Bible to church; she wasn’t going to flaunt it. Baptists like Bill carried their Bibles to church.” Clinton’s Bible was old and dog-eared, an expression of his desire to master this course of study as he would any other. He was a second tenor in the church choir, and though he never had time for choir practice, on Sundays he “would get up there and act as though he had rehearsed the whole thing,” recalled Mary Frances Vaught, the wife of the minister. “He would sing as big as anything.”

  Clinton did not go to church for social activism, nor did he go for fire and brimstone judgment and guilt-ridden repentance; he went, largely, to search for the better part of himself in a place where he could be accepted at face value. Dr. Worley Oscar Vaught, the leader of Immanuel Baptist, provided that atmosphere. They seemed an unlikely pair: Clinton the tall, bushy-haired, effusive, ambitious, freewheeling and liberal-leaning young politician, and Vaught the short, bald, bespectacled, stern-voiced, conservative religious scholar, who had been preaching since the year before Clinton was born. But Vaught was, like Clinton, at once a storyteller and an intellectual, translating the Old and the New Testaments from Hebrew and Greek and giving his worshipers detailed syntactical and semantic explications of the text. He was methodical and patient, taking more than a year to get through Genesis and devoting two or three years to Romans and Matthew. He would start every service by leading his congregation in reciting Hebrews 4:12: “The word of God is alive and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, to the dividing asunder of the soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and interests of the heart.” Later, somewhere in each sermon, he would pause and in his surprisingly strong and authoritative voice, inquire, “Are you listening?”

  Clinton was always listening to Vaught, during the sermons and in their frequent conversations. As someone who tended to think in metaphors, Clinton related the Bible to his role as governor. Each morning when he reached his office in the Capitol, there would be a quote from scripture on his desk, placed there by his personal secretary, Lynda Dixon, who also worshiped at Immanuel Baptist. He and Dixon would talk about the passage for a minute before getting to work. During the course of the day, according to Betsey Wright, Clinton would include Vaught in his round of calls, and later, “in the course of a conversation, he would say, ‘Well, Dr. Vaught told me such-and-such.’ ” Although Vaught did not presume to tell Clinton what to do, he had a profound effect on the governor’s thinking on several important social issues, most notably the death penalty and abortion.

  On capital punishment, Vaught took the initiative when it became apparent that Clinton would soon have to start setting dates for executions and make his first life-or-death calls concerning death-row inmates. Since his race for attorney general in 1976, Clinton had stated publicly that he supported the death penalty, but Vaught sensed that Cli
nton was still struggling with the issue a decade later and that he was deeply ambivalent. He called Clinton one day and said he would like to talk to the governor about it. Clinton invited him to the mansion for breakfast. He had “gone over it a thousand times,” Clinton told Vaught, and was now asking himself the question about capital punishment, “Not is this the right thing to do, but is it always the wrong thing to do.” Vaught told Clinton that in the original translations of the Ten Commandments, capital punishment was not prohibited. In ancient Hebrew and Greek, he said, the phrase was “thou shalt not murder,” not “thou shalt not kill”—which he said meant it was not the same thing as the laws of the land applying capital punishment. Clinton said he appreciated that interpretation because he had “instinctively thought you could make arguments for and against capital punishment, but didn’t think it was a violation of Christian faith.” You can make your own judgment about whether you think it’s right or wrong, Vaught told him, “but you must never worry about whether it’s forbidden by the Bible, because it isn’t.”

  On the abortion issue, it was Clinton who solicited Vaught’s advice. He had ambivalent feelings about it personally, though he agreed with the pro-choice argument intellectually and was surrounded by strong pro-choice women, including Hillary and Betsey Wright. Yet he was struggling with the notion of the definition of a human life, and he wondered whether Vaught could provide some insight from his readings of the Old and New Testaments. Vaught, who was not among the active anti-abortion clergy in Little Rock, said he shared some of Clinton’s ambivalence. He told the governor that he was almost always opposed to abortion, but had seen “some extremely difficult cases” in his life as a pastor and did not believe that the Bible forbade it in all circumstances. In the original Hebrew, Vaught said, the meaning of life and birth and personhood came from words which literally meant “to breathe life into.” From that he concluded that the literal meaning of life in the Bible would be that it began at birth, with the first intake of breath. That did not mean that abortion was right, he told Clinton, but he did not think one could say it was murder. In all of his discussions about abortion thereafter, Clinton relied on his minister’s interpretation to bolster his pro-choice position.

  Some of Clinton’s progressive friends were shocked by his relationship with Vaught, who was considered a symbol of Little Rock’s old guard. They worried that the minister’s influence was making Clinton more conservative, or alternatively that the governor was using the minister. In fact, Clinton and Vaught shared a common condition. Vaught was a transitional figure in the long-running fight between fundamentalists and moderates within the Southern Baptist Church. He used the devices of the fundamentalists, the reliance on scripture, but he supported the intellectual curiosity and openness of the moderates. Clinton considered himself a transitional figure between political liberals and conservatives. He was using the political equivalent of biblical language in an effort to bring about change. Vaught delighted in this aspect of Clinton, and thought it eventually would take him where he wanted to go.

  At a small dinner for the Vaughts’ fiftieth wedding anniversary at a restaurant atop the Union Bank Building overlooking the broad expanse of Little Rock, the elderly preacher turned to his young disciple and said, “Bill, one of these days I want to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  SAYING THE WORDS

  EIGHTEEN YEARS AFTER the Rhodes Scholars of the class of 1968 sailed across the Atlantic aboard the S.S. United States on their way to the ancient colleges of Oxford, where they were trained as “the best men for the world’s fight,” the old boys were reaching forty. Of their class of thirty-two scholars, all were still alive except Frank Aller, the draft resister who committed suicide. Doctor, lawyer, scientist, professor, journalist, investor, art curator, military officer—most of them had reached some level of achievement in their professions. Bob Reich was teaching politics and economics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Strobe Talbott was Washington bureau chief of Time magazine. Both had gained acclaim as authors, Reich writing about industrial policy and world trade, Talbott about nuclear arms control. But only one class member seemed intent on engaging in the world’s fight in the largest sense of Cecil Rhodes’s imperative. In his annual class letter in the American Oxonian, secretary Reich finally broached a subject in 1986 that he and many of his classmates had contemplated since their days together in England: Bill Clinton running for president.

  “The latest polls in Arkansas show that the governor has a seventy-two percent approval rating, which places him in the same category as McDonald’s hamburgers and Dan Rather, ahead of Ronald Reagan and the new Coca-Cola,” Reich wrote. “Rumor has it that Bill will be the Democratic candidate for president in 1988. I just made up that rumor, but by the time you read this, the rumor will have spread to the ends of the nation.”

  The expectation was always there. It had started long before there was any sense to it, back when Clinton’s mother boasted that a second-grade teacher had told her that her boy could be president. Or perhaps it went back generations further, back to his poor southern forebears who connected themselves, if only in name, to things presidential: back to Thomas Jefferson Blythe, a Confederate private from Tippah County, Mississippi, who once bet a saddle on the outcome of a sheriffs race; and to Andrew Jackson Blythe of Tennessee; and to George Washington Cassidy of Red Level, Alabama. Wherever it came from, it was always there, not a matter of predestination but of expectation and will, and it had built up year by year, decade by decade.

  ON August 26, 1986, one week after he turned forty, Clinton ascended to the chairmanship of the National Governors Association (NGA) at the group’s summer meeting in Hilton Head, South Carolina. In his acceptance speech that night, he satirized his passage into middle age, wondering whether this would be a “milestone or millstone” year for “the first of the over-the-hill baby boomers.” He also stirred the audience with a campaign-style oration in which he said his priority as chairman would be to help create more jobs. “Let me be clear,” he said. “We do not need further studies. We have a wealth of excellent material outlining the dimensions of the problem. What I want are action plans and programs.”

  The chairmanship of the NGA was part of Clinton’s own action plan. It allowed him to develop issues that he cared about, that he thought were essential to the revival of the Democratic party, especially jobs creation, education reform, and an overhaul of the welfare system, while at the same time providing him a forum to expand his reputation. He felt relaxed and at home with this collegial group of state executive peers. Here was a place where he could fit in and yet easily stand out. Harry Hughes, the governor of Maryland, recalled that his lasting image of Clinton at NGA conventions was of him “always standing, never sitting.” Hughes contrasted Clinton’s style at the meetings with those of two other ambitious governors, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts arid Mario Cuomo of New York. Dukakis was usually seated, Hughes said, plugging his way through plenary sessions, talking earnestly, while Cuomo rarely bothered to show up at all, and when he did, tended to remain apart from the gang. Clinton was always in the middle of the action, working the room, leaning against a wall perhaps, surrounded by governors and staff members, telling a joke or leading an informal discussion about the latest book by urban historian Jane Jacobs or sociologist William J. Wilson or his friend Bob Reich.

  Along with the camaraderie, the Governors Association gave Clinton opportunities to travel outside Arkansas and deliver speeches. He took on another post earlier that year that offered him additional national visibility, as chairman of the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based nonprofit commission that provided research on education issues to state officials. Little Rock state representative Gloria Cabe, whose loyalty to Clinton went back to the bleak days after his 1980 defeat, served as his educational liaison to both national groups. “Nobody ever told me to behave in this manner, so it was largely my attitude, but through
all the work I did for him in national organizations, it was with the notion that he was going to run for president,” Cabe recalled. There was no reason for Clinton to make his national ambitions too explicit at first, especially not until after his reelection that November in his noisy but not particularly close rematch with Frank White. After the election, as he began his fourth term as governor, it became increasingly obvious to his staff, as well as to Arkansas legislators and journalists, that his attention was elsewhere.

  EARLY on the evening of March 20, 1987, the office of Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas issued a brief statement announcing that he would not be a candidate for president in 1988. The announcement came as a surprise to some in the political world. Since the beginning of the year, Bumpers had been traveling the country, meeting with prominent Democratic party financiers and operatives, seeming to prepare the groundwork for a presidential campaign. Only the week before, New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who had already issued the first of many statements of noncandidacy for himself, predicted that Bumpers would make the race. But this was not the first time that Bumpers had edged toward the national spotlight and then receded from it. He had first been urged to run for president in 1976, shortly after he left the governor’s office for the Senate. He had considered it again in 1984. Now, at sixty-one, he was taking himself out of consideration for the last time. Running for president, he said in his statement, “means a total disruption of the closeness my family has cherished. If victorious, much of that closeness is necessarily lost forever. So I’ll turn to other challenges.”