The quiet announcement from the office of Senator Bumpers in Washington reverberated loudly in the office of Governor Clinton in Little Rock. Whatever Bumpers did or did not do was always of great interest to Clinton. Their relationship had gone through brief periods of hostility and longer periods of reconciliation and alliance, but it had always been marked by a certain amount of tension. They were separated by twenty years, yet often got in each other’s way. Only a year earlier, Clinton had talked to friends about challenging Bumpers for the Senate seat, but was dissuaded by Hillary, who thought he would be unhappy in the Senate, and by polls that showed Bumpers would beat Clinton in a primary. Now, with Bumpers out of the presidential derby, Clinton seriously considered making the race. Alone in his office or in the kitchen of the mansion, he worked the telephone day and night talking to friends about the pros and cons. Legislators noted that he seemed distracted, disinterested in state affairs. He was losing the major tax initiatives that year which he had hoped would pay for the final parts of his education reform effort.
Clinton and Betsey Wright dispatched scouts to Iowa, New Hampshire, and several Super Tuesday primary states to gauge how a Clinton candidacy might be received. Gloria Cabe ventured up to New Hampshire and spent three days in a Holiday Inn calling campaign activists from a list Clinton had compiled. She was preparing the way for Clinton’s first campaign-style swing through the state, which went so well that he returned home “flying like a kite,” convinced that he could finish second there and then win the southern primaries. Fundraising letters were sent to the extensive network of out-of-state friends Clinton had accumulated over the years. Charlie Daniels, the old plumber from Virginia who had met Clinton in Moscow, mailed back the first contribution. He and his wife Ethel received a note from Clinton: “Your willingness to help us defray costs while we are testing the waters is a very special vote of confidence and I’m very grateful. You’ve been wonderful friends—Thanks for everything—Things are going well—Bill.” In Arkansas, Clinton began working on seed money commitments for the $1.5 to $2 million he had been told he would need to raise within his home state to make a creditable race. Betsey Wright thought about taking a leave from the governor’s staff to concentrate on the presidential effort.
In the early morning of May 7, another Democrat was scratched from the field. This time it was Gary Hart who was forced to withdraw in the face of questions, allegations, and documented evidence regarding his extramarital sex life, which Hart had helped turn into an issue by denying that he was a philanderer and challenging reporters to tail him if they doubted his word. It was an unfortunate challenge which the Miami Herald took up, leading to an article in that newspaper and subsequent pictures in a tabloid detailing Hart’s dalliance with a model named Donna Rice. Hart’s sudden fall increased the pressure on Clinton from both ends. From one end came more longtime political pros from the McGovern era who had been allied with Hart but were now looking to Clinton as an alternative. And from the other end came the question: Did Bill Clinton have a Gary Hart problem?
As journalists and party activists in Washington asked the question among themselves, and in so doing advanced Clinton’s reputation as a womanizer, Clinton and his friends and advisers struggled with how to deal with it. Bob Armstrong, the former Texas Land Commissioner who had developed an easygoing, big-brotherly friendship with Clinton since they worked together in the McGovern campaign, had several telephone conversations with Clinton in the aftermath of the Hart implosion. One of the issues Clinton brought up, according to Armstrong, was whether there was “a statute of limitations on infidelity—whether you get any credit for getting it back together.” Armstrong told Clinton that he thought not. Clinton and Betsey Wright also had several private debates over the lessons of the Hart episode. Clinton “wanted to believe and advocated that it was irrelevant to whether the guy could be a good president,” Wright recalled. She argued that it had a significant bearing in Hart’s case “because it raised questions about his stability.” Any previous affairs might have been irrelevant, she said, but “to have one while he was running was foolhardy.”
Clinton agreed. Hart, he said, was foolish to flaunt it.
Dick Morris, still a Clinton pollster and consultant though his other clients by then were almost exclusively Republicans, was also brought into the discussions. Clinton questioned Morris at length about how he thought the public would react to the infidelity issue and whether it would be held against him. They gingerly explored different ways to address the topic or sidestep it. Morris sensed that Clinton had “a tremendous terror of the race because of the personal scandals that were visited upon candidates who ran. His experience watching candidates be destroyed by those scandals or impaired by them chilled him, and led him to a feeling that this was a terribly inhospitable environment upon which to tread.” The sex issue, Morris said, “loomed large in his consideration. It loomed very large.”
But the momentum kept building for Clinton to run. He traveled to Washington for a foreign policy briefing set up by Steve Cohen, the friend of his and Hillary’s from Yale Law who had attended the first gubernatorial inaugural in Little Rock eight years earlier, where he had told Clinton about how taken he was by the “pride and hope” he felt there. Sandy Berger and John Holum, two veterans of the McGovern and Hart campaigns, helped Cohen with the briefing. Back in Little Rock, Wright and her assistants prepared for a possible announcement. Their first choice was the House chamber inside the Capitol, but state law prohibited its use for political events of that sort, so they rented a ballroom at the Excelsior Hotel for July 15.
Rumors about Clinton’s extramarital sex life began making the rounds in Little Rock. A few days before the announcement, Wright met with Clinton at her home on Hill Street. The time had come, she felt, for Clinton to get past what she considered his self-denial tendencies and face the issue squarely. For years, she told friends later, she had been covering up for him. She was convinced that some state troopers were soliciting women for him, and he for them, she said. Sometimes when Clinton was on the road, Wright would call his room in the middle of the night and no one would answer. She hated that part of him, but felt that the other sides of him overshadowed his personal weaknesses.
“Okay,” she said to him as they sat in her living room. Then she started listing the names of women he had allegedly had affairs with and the places where they were said to have occurred. “Now,” she concluded, “I want you to tell me the truth about every one.” She went over the list twice with Clinton, according to her later account, the second time trying to determine whether any of the women might tell their stories to the press. At the end of the process, she suggested that he should not get into the race. He owed it to Hillary and Chelsea not to.
The next day, Wright drove to the airport and picked up Carl Wagner, the first of a group of Clinton friends who had planned to gather in Little Rock for the presidential announcement. Wagner was a generational co-hort who had met Clinton during the Project Pursestrings antiwar effort in the summer of 1970. They had gone through the McGovern campaign together, Wagner running Michigan while Clinton ran Texas, and had kept in touch ever since. Wagner, like Clinton, loved to talk on the phone. Clinton had asked him to come down to Little Rock a day early to help “think this thing through.” On the way back from the airport, Wright did not tell Wagner about her encounter with Clinton the day before. She did offer her opinion that her boss seemed “too conflicted” and “might not be ready.”
Wagner met with Clinton and Hillary at the Governor’s Mansion that night. They sat around the table in the kitchen and talked for several hours. It was, Wagner recalled, an intense, blunt conversation in which he and Hillary assessed the practicality of Clinton making the presidential race, element by element. Could Clinton raise $20 million? Did he have the time he needed? They analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the other candidates, especially the probable Republican nominee, Vice President George Bush. Wagner thought that the economy wou
ld be strong enough to make Bush difficult to beat. Clinton was surprised by that argument and launched into a long discussion of economic policy. Wagner noticed that Clinton was more comfortable talking about policy, depersonalizing the discussion. He wondered whether Clinton was prepared for the consequences if he became a candidate. At the end of the evening, as Clinton and Hillary moved toward the stairs leading from the kitchen up to their second-floor bedroom, Clinton turned to Wagner, who was still seated at the table, and asked, “So what’s the bottom line?”
“I tell you what,” Wagner responded. “When you reach the top of the steps, walk into your daughter’s bedroom, look at her, and understand that if you do this, your relationship with her will never be the same. I’m not sure if it will be worse or better, but it will never be the same.”
After Clinton disappeared up the steps, Wagner went to the phone and called Steve Cohen, who planned to be at the announcement. “Jesus Christ,” Cohen remembered Wagner telling him, “this guy doesn’t know whether he wants to run!” Cohen called Sandy Berger, who also had airplane reservations for Little Rock. There was a chance Clinton might not run, Cohen said. They decided to go anyway.
By early afternoon the next day, a dozen Clinton friends from around the country had congregated at the Governor’s Mansion for an announcement-eve luncheon. Most waited in the living room as Clinton sat on the porch steps leading out to the back lawn, engaged in a final conversation with Wagner and Mickey Kantor, the California lawyer and Democratic activist who had been part of Clinton’s network since the Carter era. If Clinton had privately made up his mind after the encounter with Betsey Wright, if he had reached a decision after the discussion with Wagner in the kitchen the night before, he still felt a need to weigh the options to the last possible moment. Kantor took the lead as they talked about the level of commitment that a national campaign required. As they talked, Chelsea, then seven years old, approached her father and asked him about a family vacation planned for later that summer. As Kantor remembered the scene, Clinton told his daughter that he might not be able to go because he might be running for president. “Well,” Kantor recalled Chelsea responding, “then Mom and I will go without you.”
Chelsea always had a powerful effect on Clinton. He carried pictures of her around in his wallet and showed them to friends whenever he was on the road. He could get misty-eyed talking about her. They held hands whenever they were together. When he was in town, he tried to drive her to school every morning. Earlier that year, on a Sunday morning at the start of the legislative session, his aide and former high school teacher, Paul Root, and Root’s wife Mary, who was also a teacher, accompanied Clinton and Chelsea to a prayer breakfast at the First Baptist Church in Benton. When father and daughter came out of the mansion and got into the car, Root recalled, Clinton said that he might not talk to them much on the ride down to Benton because he did not get that much time with Chelsea and their favorite thing to do together was read books. Chelsea opened her church book and found her favorite story. Father and daughter read it aloud together. They did the same thing on the way home from Benton. As they neared the mansion, Clinton turned to Mary Root and asked, “Is that okay? The way I was reading to her?”
The subtext of Clinton’s relationship with his daughter was his own unfortunate history with fathers. He did not want to be considered a neglectful father himself, yet his political obsession gave him little time with Chelsea. He would try to soften the guilt by joking about it, often telling the story of how, when Chelsea was asked to describe what her father did, she said, “He gives speeches, drinks coffee, and talks on the telephone.” It was as true as it was amusing. Now, when Kantor saw the look on Clinton’s face after Chelsea matter-of factly scratched her father from the family vacation plans, he was sure that Clinton would not run for president that year. “It was the turning point of the conversation,” he said later.
Clinton faced the gathering of friends in the dining room and apologized for luring them all down to Little Rock for no reason. No problem, they said, one after another, some fighting to keep their composure. The struggle between family and ambition was something all of them had dealt with in various ways. John Holum helped Clinton draft a statement. Clinton did not want the news to slip out haphazardly. He had friends around the country who were expecting him to run, and he wanted them to learn about his decision at the same time. Betsey Wright and Gloria Cabe and several other aides and friends worked the telephones, setting up the calls for him and alerting the national press that there was no need to make the trip to Arkansas. Wait for another day, he said to many of those he called, “because it’s coming.” One of those who heard from Clinton was Billie Carr in Houston. It was a sentimental conversation during which Clinton talked about the importance of “putting his house in order.” Carr said she understood. “All of us in politics feel bad about neglecting our families,” she said later. “We feel bad about it—but not too bad.”
Clinton’s statement was issued late in the day. “I need some family time: I need some personal time,” he said. “Politicians are people too. I think sometimes we forget it, but they really are. The only thing I or any other candidate has to offer in running for president is what’s inside. That’s what sets people on fire and gets their confidence and their votes, whether they live in Wisconsin or Montana or New York. That part of my life needs renewal. The other, even more important reason for my decision is the certain impact that this campaign would have had on our daughter. The only way I could have won, getting in this late, after others had been working up to two years, would be to go on the road full time from now until the end, and to have Hillary do the same thing…. I’ve seen a lot of kids grow up under these pressures and a long, long time ago I made a promise to myself that if I was ever lucky enough to have a child, she would never grow up wondering who her father was.”
That night, a group of Clinton’s high school friends gathered at Carolyn Staley’s house near the mansion in Little Rock. Clinton, his staff had said, would be too busy to attend, but he came over anyway. The friends had suspected that he would find his way there: Bill usually sought them out when he needed to ease the pressure and emotion of his public life. Just looking at David Leopoulos could make him feel better. “So,” Leopoulos said at one point that night, “this reminds me of the Fuhgawe Indians.” Clinton was the only one in the room who knew what Leopoulos was talking about. They both started laughing. It was their oldest, corniest joke, one they used to tell as they sat atop the mountain above Hot Springs. It was about the Indians who had no name until they got lost in the mountains and one of them asked, “Where the fuhgawe?”
ON a Sunday morning in early February of 1988, Clinton was asked to talk to a class of single adults at Immanuel Baptist Church. Most members of the group were professionals in their twenties and thirties. The theme he chose was “the conflict between the idea of progress and the certainty of death.” Sometimes, he said, it is hard “to keep going when you know that the sand’s running out of the hourglass. Yet you still have a moral obligation to try to make tomorrow better than today.” A few days later, in a speech at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Clinton recalled his Sunday School sermon and said that in his own life he had two hourglasses going at once, one his mortality as a person and the other his mortality as a politician. Knowing about the first made him feel more urgency about the second and all that he still hoped to accomplish. “I think about it,” he said, “as the time ebbs away.”
ATLANTA, Georgia: July 20, 1988. This was the third consecutive convention at which Clinton had made the coveted list of speakers. In 1980, he had been selected to present the issues affecting the nation’s governors. In 1984, his assignment was to deliver a tribute to Harry Truman. This 1988 Democratic National Convention might have been the time he talked about himself. But another governor, Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, had top billing, and another governor, Ann Richards of Texas, became a star as the keynote speaker. Jesse Jackson had
already stirred the convention hall with an emotional speech. Clinton would give the nominating speech for Dukakis. By tradition, several speakers nominated a presidential candidate. Clinton would do it alone, in prime time, before all the audiences he wanted to reach. It could be the first speech of his future campaign.
Clinton had stayed up all night revising his speech, going through nine full drafts. Ordinarily he spoke extemporaneously, working off notes, but this speech had to be a finished document, to be read and approved by Dukakis and his aides. Hillary had never seen him work so hard on a speech, she told friends. He would tackle a section, go over it with his advisers, and then scrap it and redo it, again and again, adding more themes, inserting paragraphs. His secretary got so worn out typing and retyping drafts overnight that she ended up needing medical treatment for exhaustion. By midmorning, when the manuscript was essentially finished, Clinton was concerned that it was too long, yet Dukakis aides called three more times with suggested additions. Clinton had been allotted twenty minutes, including pauses for applause and demonstrations, and it was timed with no interruptions at sixteen minutes. His advisers had other concerns. Betsey Wright, Gloria Cabe, and Bruce Lindsey, the Little Rock lawyer who was becoming Clinton’s most trusted traveling aide, had all listened to him give countless rousing speeches that brought his audiences to standing ovations. They knew that it would be hard to turn an introduction into a scintillating oration. But this text, Cabe thought, had been redone so many times by Clinton and had so many inserts from the Dukakis camp that it had become plain vanilla. After reading it with Lindsey and Wright, she turned to them and said, “All the Bill Clinton’s been taken out of it.”
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