First In His Class (15 page)

Hope was an ancestral home for Mary Holt as well. Her uncle, a former congressman, had once been the town's leading politician.
The day
after the speech, she took Clinton and her daughters out to Rose Hill Cemetery to clear the family grave sites and grace them with fresh flowers. When they were done, Clinton asked Lyda Holt if she wanted to walk in the cemetery. They took a long walk around. Finally, Clinton stopped and said, “This is my dad.” He pointed to a flat marble gravestone about fifteen feet from the path on the northern edge of the cemetery. It read:

W
ILLIAM
J
EFFERSON
B
LYTHE
FEB. 27, 1918
MAY 17, 1946

“Oh, my Lord,” Lyda Holt gasped. She had always thought that Mr. Clinton was his dad. They stood there quietly as Clinton told them the story of how his father had been killed in a car accident before Bill was born. Blythe's grave rested next to an identical marker for Clinton's maternal grandfather, Eldridge Cassidy, the Hope iceman, who died at age fifty-six.
The visit, he told Denise in a letter, was “
a good
reminder that I have a lot of living to do for two other fine fellows who never even got close to the average lifespan…. If I had to die tomorrow I guess I'd feel in a way that I've lived a long time—and a full time. But should I live to be old I know I'll feel as if I just started on this journey of life and hardly be ready to leave.”

From the cemetery, Clinton took the Holts over to see Mack McLarty, who was home for the summer working at his father's Ford dealership. Seeing Mack and his family, the symbols of success in Hope, always reassured Clinton, he later told a friend, yet served to remind him of how much work there was ahead for him to get where he wanted to go, far beyond the life of a small-town hero.

A few days later, the foursome spent an afternoon campaigning in Arkadelphia in the Fourth Congressional District where Democrat David Pryor was on his way to winning a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
It was
a scorching day, and Pryor was dripping with sweat as he walked toward the Arkadelphia fire station to start shaking hands. As he approached, a young man came strolling out and struck up an intense conver-sation. When Pryor got back to his car, his wife asked, ‘Who was that you were talking to?' Pryor said it was young Bill Clinton from Hot Springs. “You're gonna hear a lot about him,” Pryor said. He could tell. When Clinton asked a question, he listened to the response. He was, said Pryor, “on fire.”

Temperatures soared near the century mark as the Holt family caravan rolled east toward the Mississippi Delta. “
I think
the heat has burned GU out of my system,” Clinton wrote to Denise, referring to Georgetown by its initials. Hot, flat, and poor, the Delta was by any measure a long way from the hilltop, and had more of the feel of rural black poverty than Hope, Hot Springs, and Little Rock, the Arkansas towns with which he was most familiar. Clinton's reactions to what he was seeing in the Delta alternated between awe and embarrassment.

“Boy,
you meet
all kinds on a trip like this,” he told Denise in a July 14 letter. “I would give anything if you could see all the tiny towns we've been through—Altheimer, Wabbaseka, Ulm, McGehee, Lake Village, Arkansas City. The populations are mostly Negroes and the towns are either just a square or only one street for a couple of blocks. The buildings are the same as those erected at the town's birth.” But in another section of that same letter he described his dismay at encountering Deep South racism at its most blatant. “Now we are campaigning in the heart of cotton country, south and east Arkansas, where Negroes are still niggers'and I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw restrooms and waiting rooms still marked in Colored and White. It made me so sick to my stomach.”

When they reached McGehee, the Holt women attracted the notice of a feature writer from the
Memphis Commercial-Appeal
, who wrote an article about what he considered the novelty of finding a candidate's wife and daughters out on the trail. The story detailed the scene inside the car. One can see Clinton's presence everywhere, though he is mentioned only at the end in an offbeat way:

The Holts
travel in an airconditioned Ford in an attempt to save themselves from the unbearable heat—but it doesn't help much. They jump in and out of the auto time and again all day.

“We're constantly debating whether it's better to run the air-condition-ing when we're in the car or just roll the windows down and stay in one temperature all the time,” Mrs. Holt said.

Between towns the two girls do some reading and Mrs. Holt looks over a typical itinerary provided a week at a time by campaign headquarters in Little Rock…. In the back seat Wednesday were two paperback books, one on Kennedy and a novel—Khartoum. The car, loaned for the campaign, came equipped with a stereo tape player which Wednesday appropriately was playing a tape of the Norman Luboff choir titled “On the Country Side.”

And there's a convenient safety device. College student Bill Clinton of Hot Springs, the Holt family driver, can lock all four car doors instantly with a flick of the switch on the dash.

Those books in the back seat did not belong to the Holt girls, but to Clinton.
In his
letters he faithfully reported to Denise what he was reading and suggested readings for her. “Never finished ‘1000 Days' [Arthur Schlesinger's account of the Kennedy presidency] but did read Khartoum, the Loved One by Evelyn Waugh and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” he told her. “Have dabbled in five or six others.” In response to Denise's latest review of a book he had recommended, he added: “I knew you would like The Making of the President '60. White is a great writer and a perceptive politico.” He also noted that he had recently received a letter from his favorite professor, Walter Giles, “wishing good luck in the campaign, but expressing hopes it hasn't interfered with my reading.” If anything, the campaign widened Clinton's perspective, presenting him with characters straight out of many of the books he was reading. After encountering one provincial tycoon, Clinton described him to Denise with a literary refer-ence. “Just like a Jonas Cord of ß The Carpetbaggers' or Will Long of ß A Long Hot Summer,' he wrote, “he hasn't learned to gracefully exercise the power that goes with his money.”

•  •  •

E
VERY
week, Frank Holt's opponents attacked him with unsubstantiated charges, and every week Holt chose to ignore the attacks. Clinton admired Holt's attitude and thought that it was strategically sound. “Denise, he'
s never
lost an election and I see why,” he told his girlfriend. “He really lives by his religious and ethical convictions without being self-righteous or pious. He refuses to attack his opponents as they attack him. He wants to win on his own merits or not at all. He thinks he can't build Arkansas unless he can win in this way.” Then came the shock of primary night. Holt barely survived, finishing second in a six-way race to Jim Johnson, his despised former colleague on the state Supreme Court, the self-described “Justice Jim” who appealed to people's fears and prejudices in his backward state. Johnson finished with 25 percent of the vote to 22 percent for Holt and 15 percent for the third-place finisher, Brooks Hays. Holt's showing was more of a surprise to his followers than it should have been. In retrospect they could see how little room to maneuver he had, with Johnson on his right, Hays on his left, and scores of Republicans taking advantage of the open primary system to vote for Johnson, the man they thought would be easiest for Rockefeller to beat.

Holt tried to shape the runoff race as New South versus Old South, but to little effect. To whatever extent Arkansans were looking to become part of a New South, those who did had now decided that Winthrop Rockefel-ler, not Holt, would be the one to take them there. And in a year when many of the state's schools were just facing desegregation, there was plenty of sentiment around for Justice Jim's Old South.

Three days before the runoff, Clinton wrote Denise that he thought Holt had finally taken the offensive in the campaign. “
All I
can do is pray for reason and real courage to come to our voters Tuesday.” On election eve: “I think I'm sure victory will come, but you can never tell. And after the shock of the 26th I'm so worried…. Cross your fingers and hold tight—he's just got to get in there.” But the family already knew better. Lyda Holt sensed on election morning that they had lost. “We went to church that morning and let go.” That night, Clinton was assigned to accompany Lyda. She later remembered “how reassuring” he was. “
He stayed sweet and nice
. When you lose an election, it's like a death. And Bill that night said to me, ‘Now remember, the outcome of an election is not the measure of a man.ߣ”

Clinton made his next important political move as Judge Holt was playing out his last one.
He told
Jack Holt, Jr., that he needed some money to help pay for his college tuition and wondered whether there was any way he could work for Senator Fulbright's office in Washington. Holt called
Lee Williams
, Fulbright's administrative assistant. “Lee, I've got one you shouldn't overlook,” he said. “There's a young man down here who's just the kind the senator likes to have around him.”

Lee Williams was always looking to help aspiring young men, just as he had been helped when Fulbright called the University of Arkansas Law School a generation earlier and asked if there were any bright graduates around who could work on his staff. Clinton was at home on Scully Street a week later when he got a morning call from Williams. “You've been recommended to me by someone in whom I have implicit faith,” Williams said. “Tell me about yourself and what your aims are.” Clinton talked about his interest in government and politics and said he needed money to complete his education at Georgetown. He brought up the time he had come to Washington for Boys Nation and had lunch with Senator Fulbright.

“Well,” said Williams, “we've got two jobs up here—one part time that pays about thirty-five hundred a year and another that is full time that pays about five thousand.”

“Well, how about two part-time jobs?” asked Clinton.

Williams chuckled.

The job offer brought with it only one disappointment. All summer long Denise Hyland had been planning to visit Clinton and his family in Hot Springs. She had arranged to come near the end of August. But Clinton would be gone by then. Williams wanted him right away.
Virginia Clinton
wrote Denise a note of apology. “We're all so disappointed you're not coming. The prospect of your coming even brightened Mr. Holt's defeat. You know my dear this door is always open to you. So this time you set the date. Bill's Daddy and brother both feel cheated.” But Clinton would see Denise soon enough in Washington. Nothing could get him down now. On August 19, the day he turned twenty years old, he declared it “
one of
my happiest birthdays ever.” He had just gone up to Little Rock to pick out a new suit, a pair of shoes, and luggage. He was “okay on the clothes end,” he told Denise. “But I'm still awful nervous about going to D.C.”

CHAPTER FIVE
 
THE BACK ROOM BOYS

O
N THE AFTERNOON
of September 26, 1966, Bill Clinton dashed off a letter to his grandmother at her nursing home in Hope extolling his new life as a Georgetown junior and clerk on Capitol Hill. “Dear Mammaw,” he wrote in his backward-tilting left-handed scrawl,

I am
well settled in school and at work. I attend class in the morning and at night and work in the afternoon. It is of course exciting to be here around all the senators and already this year I've seen the president, the vice president and senators Fulbright, Robert and Edward Kennedy, Javits, Long of Louisiana, Smathers of Florida, Yarborough of Texas, Anderson of New Mexico, McClellan, Thurmond of South Carolina, Church of Idaho, Williams of New Jersey, Boggs of Delaware, McCarthy of Minnesota, Murphy of California, Stennis of Mississippi and others. There's not much time to do anything but study and work, but I love being busy and hard work is good for people.