First In His Class (2 page)

T
HE BOYS RODE
down to the White House in two airconditioned buses, fifty scrubbed faces per coach, hair clipped, shoes polished, slacks creased, young chests fairly busting from white short-sleeve knit shirts inscribed over the left breast with the seal of the American Legion. They were high school seniors-to-be, a proud collection of eager-beaver class leaders born in the first year of the postwar boom, groomed for success in the backwater redoubts of service club America, towns named Hardaway and Sylvester and Midland and Lititz and Westfield and Hot Springs. Some of these boys were so provincial that they had never before traveled by overnight train or flown by commercial airliner. Now, for five days in Washington as senators at Boys Nation, they had been playing the roles of powerful actors on the political stage, their schedules crammed with mock debates, speeches, and elections, as well as lunches in the Senate Dining Room and briefings at the Department of State. Boys Nation was an educational exercise, mostly, and partly a reward for academic achievement, but it also offered a hint of something grander. Hour after hour
the boys
heard older men call them the future leaders of the free world, and while some only dimly envisioned such a prospect, others accepted it as their fate. For them this week was a coming-out party and dress rehearsal.

The capital region was caught in a midsummer snare of high heat and humidity that July of 1963, particularly stifling to the one hundred teenage senators each night out at the University of Maryland campus where their closet-sized dormitory rooms lacked not only air conditioners but even electric fans. But on Wednesday the 24th as the buses rolled south from College Park toward the White House, the morning sky opened blue and gentle, graced by a soft breeze, as though the weather acknowledged its own assignment for an event that, decades later, would resurface as a national icon of political fate and ambition.

The boys were on their way to meet President John F. Kennedy in the Rose Garden. Though young, stylish, and witty, Kennedy was hardly a mythic figure two and a half years into his term. Many in the Boys Nation enclave looked upon him with ideological caution, reflecting the conservative views of their sponsors in the American Legion's division of National Americanism.
They made
no secret of their admiration for Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, an apostle of antifederalism then building a national movement that made Kennedy nervous about a second term. Still, JFK was a war hero and the leader of the free world. He represented the archetype of what Boys Nation alumni were supposed to become. The boys were excited to meet him. For most of the half-hour trip down from the Maryland campus, their buses resounded with nervous, anticipatory chatter.

Daniel J. O'Connor, a New York lawyer and director of National Americanism for the Legion, led the contingent on the first bus. He and his staff assistants, veterans of World War II or Korea, carefully briefed their charges on proper behavior in the Rose Garden:
Security will be tight. If you wander off, the Secret Service will stop you. Stay together. Stay in rows. If the president comes down to greet you, do not crowd around. If you do, he'll withdraw.
O'Connor knew
that his boys were well mannered. He had encountered little trouble from them in Washington beyond a few curfew violations and the time when some of them disturbed Secretary Rusk by snapping flashbulb cameras as he delivered a solemn address on world affairs at the State Department auditorium. Minor stuff. But O'Connor wanted to be certain that the Legion boys would not replay a recent Rose Garden embarrassment when foreign exchange students had mobbed the president and somehow liberated his cuff links and tie clasp, walking off with his accessories as unsolicited souvenirs.

On the bus, O'Connor chatted with several boys. He asked each one where he was from and what he thought of Washington so far. One lad lingered
in his
presence longer than the others, leaving an impression that O'Connor could call to mind years later. It was Bill Clinton of Hot Springs, Arkansas. He was only sixteen, but one of the bigger boys physically at six foot three and two hundred pounds, with a wave of brown hair and a good-natured manner. Clinton was curious about what lay in store for the boys that morning. His own intentions were clear. He asked O'Connor whether he could have his picture taken with President Kennedy. “Sure,” O'Connor said. “But I'm not sure what the Secret Service regulations are. We'll have to see when we get there.” Clinton pressed the issue. It sure would be great, he said, if he could get his picture taken with the president. The boy
from Arkansas, O'Connor recalled, “certainly seemed bound and determined.”

W
HATEVER
little encouragement Clinton needed to confront the political whirl of Washington that summer came from two strong women: his mother, Virginia, and his high school principal, Johnnie Mae Mackey. They were opposites in many respects: Virginia Clinton, a nurse anesthetist, layered her face with makeup, dyed her hair black with a bold white racing stripe, painted thick, sweeping eyebrows high above their original position, smoked two packs of Pall Mall cigarettes a day, bathed in a sunken tub, drank liquor, was an irrepressible flirt, and enjoyed the underbelly of her resort town, with its racetrack and gaming parlors and nightclubs. Johnnie Mae Mackey strode through town as a tall and imposing enforcer of moral rectitude whose interests were God, country, flag, politics, church, and Hot Springs High. Yet they were both optimists, and they saw one bright boy a
s the
embodiment of their hopes. They had lost husbands already, each of them. Billy Clinton was their manchild.

Mackey, whose husband, a World War II veteran, had died of diabetes, belonged to the American Legion auxiliary at Warren Townsend Post No. 13 in Hot Springs. Through that club and her position at the school she became an influential force in student government programs sponsored by the Legion each summer. She had a deep interest in Arkansas politics and played a prominent role in Governor Orval Faubus's network of women supporters around the state. She instilled in her students the conviction that the political life was noble and that there was no higher calling than public service. One of her favorite tasks during the final week of class each spring was to announce over the public address system the names of junior boys who had been selected by the faculty to attend Arkansas Boys State at Camp Robinson in North Little Rock in June. Hot Springs traditionally sent a large and powerful state delegation under Mrs. Mackey's leadership. In the class ahead of Clinton's, a Hot Springs student had been elected Boys State governor.

To be elected governor was the ultimate accomplishment at the state level of this political prepping ground. It was the contest that attracted the most gossip, speculation, and excitement, the one that carried heady prestige within the peer group. Many states did not even elect the two senators who attended Boys Nation; they were chosen instead by adult supervisors, who often simply rewarded the governor and lieutenant governor by sending them to Washington. Arkansas elected its senators, but the senate vote came at the end of the week, almost as an afterthought to the contest for governor. When Clinton arrived at Camp Robinson, he had little chance at
the governorship. For one thing, it would be difficult for Hot Springs to grab the top post two years in a row. But even more important, the most respected and well-connected student leader in Arkansas was running for governor that year—Mack McLarty of Hope.

Mack and Billy, acquaintances since they attended kindergarten together, presented a classic small-town contrast. They had been born months apart in Hope, a modest railroad hub in southwest Arkansas. McLarty's mother came from the landed gentry and his daddy ran the most prosperous Ford dealership in that corner of the state. Clinton's mother was the daughter of the town iceman. His biological father was dead and his stepfather was an abusive alcoholic. In the stratified southern culture, McLarty was expected to excel; Clinton's abilities were viewed as a freak of nature. When the Clintons left Hope for Hot Springs in 1952, when Billy was six, the wave of their departure left barely a ripple. Only his mother and grandmother harbored grand notions of what might be in store for him.

Thomas Franklin McLarty III, cocksure, snappy, and athletic, a natural leader who became student council president and all-district quarterback for a powerhouse 11-1 football team, Number 12, as quick as a hiccup on the option—Mack was Hope's favorite son. Governor of Boys State was thought to be merely the first step in his march to prominence. As a campaigner, Mack was sweet and syrupy. In his speeches at Camp Robinson he talked mostly about how glad he was to get to know so many good people in such a fine state in such a wonderful country. His slogan was candy-coated: If You Can Remember M&Ms, Remember Mack McLarty. He built a campaign coalition drawing largely from athletic contacts and trounced his articulate but rather bookish opponent. There seemed to be a conspiracy of quarterbacks that year: the boys elected lieutenant governor and attorney general were also signal callers.

But none of the quarterbacks worked the field quite like clumsy Bill Clinton when he ran for senate at the end of the week. He studied each barracks at Camp Robinson, learning which schools were staying where, what the likes and dislikes of the students in each section might be, who they might know in common. The other boys from Hot Springs had seen Clinton switch into campaign mode before but never with this intensity. Ron Cecil was amazed by his friend's political savvy and the urgency with which he shook the hands of strangers. Phil Jamison, another classmate, noticed that Clinton was thoroughly familiar with the camp culture before he arrived and had plotted his senate race while other boys were still finding their way around. There were hundreds of boys there, Clinton told Jamison, and if he could meet every one of them they would like him and he would win. He formed a campaign team that canvassed the cabins at
night and posted himself outside the cafeteria at six-thirty each morning, working the breakfast crowd like a factory gate.

McLarty, elected governor, maintained his status as the top boy in Arkansas. But Clinton, elected senator, was the one now going somewhere. He prepared for his trip to Washington. “It's the biggest thrill and honor of my life,” he said after winning. “I hope I can do the tremendous job required of me as a representative of the state. I hope I can live up to the task.”

O
N
the morning of July 19, 1963, two young senators from Arkansas met at Adams Field in Little Rock for the flight to Boys Nation, the first venture to the East Coast for either Clinton or his colleague, Larry Taunton of El Dorado.
Amid the
excitement and anxiety, Taunton took special note of the relationship between the other boy and his mother. He had rarely seen anything like it. Mrs. Clinton radiated such an intense interest in her son that she seemed almost to be hovering over and around him.

Every week, it seemed, her boy Billy was doing something else to make her proud, to relieve her mind of her own troubles. Virginia Clinton had convinced herself that he had a rendezvous with fame.
She loved
to tell the story of how a second-grade teacher had predicted that he would be president someday. Now he was flying to Washington. Maybe, she told friends, Billy would meet the handsome young president. The Clintons were Democrats in a resort town overtaken by conservative northern retirees who had come to Hot Springs for its mild climate and restorative waters. In his ninth-grade civics class, when the teacher organized a Nixon-Kennedy election debate, Clinton was the lone Kennedy supporter.

The eighteenth
annual American Legion Boys Nation was meticulously regulated. Reveille at seven each morning, lights out at ten at night. The boys marched in straight lines to the dining hall and waited in lines for the buses that carried them down to the federal district each day. They were organized into four sections—Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and Madison—each section with its own counselors and living quarters. The two senators from each state shared a dormitory room, but they were placed arbitrarily in separate political parties, one a Federalist, one a Nationalist. Clinton was assigned to Adams Section, Nationalist party.
The official
politicking began Sunday night, after a day trip to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at National Cemetery, when the Nationalists and Federalists convened to draft their party platforms and the senators began considering their two major bills for the week, one that called for the creation of a department of Housing and Urban Affairs and included a public accommodations civil rights measure, and another that would institute federal funding of campaigns. There was little dispute about foreign policy. Southeast
Asia, a growing trouble spot for the Kennedy administration, was not yet the preoccupation that it would soon become for these boys.
The looming
danger, the Federalists declared, was “the Communistic threat.” Clinton's Nationalist party agreed, adding that the Communists must be stopped wherever they attempt to impose their will through force because “appeasement leads to aggression.”