First In His Class (44 page)

As in the first campaign in which he had worked, Frank Holt's race for governor of Arkansas in 1966, when he spent his extra hours over at the Holt house in Little Rock eating and chatting and napping, Clinton used the Duffey campaign to develop family-style ties with colleagues. It seemed that he had a surrogate mother in every town. On his way home at night he would often stop at Mickey Donenfeld's in Milford. “He'
d come
over, Chuca would come over, with their friends, and we'd talk and I would feed them. Bill ate quite healthily. Whatever we had, he'd eat. He'd come over for breakfast, too. Bacon and eggs. And he took a lot of naps at my house. In the living room, on the couch, he'd be snoozing.”

They were mostly catnaps. Clinton was always on the move. He shared a four-bedroom beach house on Long Island Sound near Milford with three law school classmates: Doug Eakeley, his Rhodes Scholar friend from University
College; Donald Pogue, who had been the Dartmouth debate partner of John Isaacson; and Bill Coleman, one of ten black students in Clinton's class. The drive to New Haven, where the law school and Third District campaign headquarters were located, took about twenty minutes up Route 1. When not cruising the district checking on local coordinators, Clinton was often traveling an hour up the highway to the state headquarters in Hartford. Anyone looking for him that semester knew that the Yale Law library was probably the last place to find him. Although his housemates and campaign co-workers were amazed by how Clinton seemed to find extra hours in his day, he devoted few of them to Yale Law.

The Senate race was the toughest course he took that semester, and it left the most lasting impression on him. The two central dilemmas Joe Duffey and his supporters faced in 1970 were the same ones Clinton would struggle with over the next two decades during his rise in Arkansas and on the national scene: first, how to hold together the competing forces within the Democratic party; and second, the related question of how to champion social change without alienating the vast American middle class. These questions were still relatively new for the Democrats in 1970 after a decade in which the party and country at large had been ripping apart over issues of peace and race.

The cultural fissure was widened in Connecticut by Dodd's presence on the ballot as a third-party candidate. Although the Democratic machine ostensibly supported Duffey once he won the primary, Dodd, despite his difficulties, retained many of his ties to old-line elements of the party.
Wexler realized
that in many of the blue-collar districts where the Duffey forces canvassed, there was “a longstanding devotion to Tom Dodd based on the many years of help he had given families during hard times.” Organized labor was split. Some union leaders still held grudges against Wexler for her prominence in the McCarthy campaign and reluctance in the fall of 1968 to endorse their favorite son, Hubert Humphrey. With Dodd and Weicker, a moderate Republican, positioned to Duffey's right, and with Duffey's public identity shaped by his activism on civil rights and Vietnam, it was difficult for the campaign to articulate broader themes and avoid being tagged as too far to the left.

Duffey and his campaign leaders understood the dilemma intellectually. From the moment that students started flooding into the state after the invasion of Cambodia, Duffey viewed their presence as a mixed blessing. Many of the students came out of wealthy suburbs and had no skills at communicating with working-class voters, whose sons tended to be the ones getting killed in Vietnam. “
We had
a lot of students who had never talked to a union member in their life and who had no idea what a factory was like inside,” Duffey recalled. He said he became so fearful of how the
youth brigades might hurt his effort to build a broad-based coalition that he established a rule that students could canvas only when accompanied by people from the neighborhood.

In the Duffey campaign, as in the antiwar movement and the Democratic party, there was a tension between the middle and the left, between purists and realists. Duffey and his top aides considered themselves realists who, in Podesta's words, sought to build “a broad-based, new kind of redefined Democratic coalition that was post-Great Society and accepted the notion that government couldn't solve everything.” Clinton,
with his
adaptability and his ability to talk to opposing factions, “embodied the campaign's efforts to appeal to diverse elements,” according to Wexler. Some believed that Clinton was better at that effort than the candidate himself. Duffey, earnest and intelligent, was admired by his troops, but he was not charismatic or especially adept at the mix-and-mingle aspects of politics. John Spotila, the Georgetown classmate of Clinton's, who was also attending Yale Law School, was recruited by Clinton to run the West Haven operation, which was regarded as Archie Bunker territory. Duffey, Spotila thought, “
could never
bridge the gap there. I'm not sure that he really tried. I never saw him in West Haven. Bill was better at bridging the gap than Joe was.”

The irony
here was that Duffey, more than most of his followers, was a product of blue-collar America. He had grown up in West Virginia, the son of a coal miner who had lost a leg in the mines. But by the time he made the Senate race, many people thought of him as the darling of Connecticut's cocktail party liberal elite. “You're too god-damn nice” to run, one friend told Duffey, who had been ordained as a Congregationalist minister. That Duffey was an antiwar college professor and chairman of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action “made it harder with blue-collar voters,” according to Podesta. Larry Kudlow, coordinator for the First Congressional District based in Hartford, said the campaign could see the working-class white voters splitting away—the same voters who a decade later would be called Reagan Democrats—“
but we
couldn't get to them. We could not deal with what was then called the hard-hat vote. There was a lot of hostility.”

In the campaign's final month, construction workers wearing hard hats as badges of patriotism often confronted Duffey along the campaign trail, carrying signs that read “Duffey the Radical” and “SDS, Pot and Duffey Go Together” and “A Vote for Duffey Is a Vote for Khrushchev.”
When one
critic rushed up to Duffey at a Knights of Columbus picnic in New Haven and called him a Communist, one of his key labor supporters, Vincent Sirabella, a leader of the blue-collar workers at Yale, stepped in, assumed a fighting stance, and proclaimed, “Nobody calls my friend Duffey a Communist
in front of me!” Duffey himself finally lost his temper in October when he heard that Vice President Spiro Agnew had delivered a speech labeling the Americans for Democratic Action a “nest of radicals” and its chairman, Duffey, a “revisionist Marxist.” (Duffey was once quoted saying that of himself in a sarcastic manner, attempting to contrast his views with those of hard-line leftists. Now he denounced Agnew as a “cowardly liar.”)

The Duffey
crew worked hard to the end. The issues staff put in long hours developing positions on everything from military conversion to recycling. Duffey would privately joke that his campaign had “more positions than the Kama Sutra.” The canvassers eventually reached nearly every Democratic and independent household in the state. Chuca Meyer, who spent election day getting out the vote in the industrial city of Waterbury, was “naive enough to believe in miracles. We'd had miracles in the convention and at the primary, so why not another one?” But at campaign headquarters there was less optimism. “No one there thought Duffey could win—not even Duffey,” according to Podesta. Weicker prevailed in the three-way contest with 41.7 percent of the vote. Duffey finished second, with 33.8 percent. Dodd was the spoiler, with 24.5 percent. Podesta viewed it as “a tidal wave of rejection. It wasn't close. There was no thought of a recount.” Duffey lost every congressional district, including Clinton's. He carried heavily Democratic New Haven, but not by as much as expected.

Losing elections was nothing new for Bill Clinton, but he rarely seemed to suffer for losing. He emerged from the Duffey campaign with an expanded circle of friends and allies who would come to his assistance in later years. He found another political mentor in Anne Wexler, who shared his reverence for the system, a practical reformer who had the instincts of an old-fashioned pol, loved the political game and its rules, and who played to win. And in Duffey's defeat he caught the first glimpses of what he might have to do later to bring elements of the party together.

Perhaps the lesson of Connecticut was best expressed by Duffey himself in a campaign postscript which he later wrote:

It is
always tempting to blame our defeat on those people who never understood what we were trying to say or who rejected our efforts to lead them. But the fact is that the search for a new politics in America is still at a very primitive stage…. Many of our policies have been formulated as if the nation were composed of only two major groups—the affluent and the welfare poor. But somewhere between affluence and grinding poverty stand the majority of American families, living on the margins of social and economic insecurity. The new politics has thus far
not spoken to the needs and interests of those Americans. We have forgotten that they, too, feel the victims of decisions in which they have no voice.

Clinton had spent many days and nights talking to Duffey and Anne Wexler about how the new politics might someday figure out ways not to alienate middle America. Duffey's words were stored away.

O
NCE
during the campaign
, Anne Wexler, overtaken by curiosity, asked Clinton whether he ever went to class. “He kind of laughed and I never asked him again. I never asked him again because I needed him. And he seemed very relaxed about it.”

In the middle of November, a few weeks after the election, a first-year student at the law school was walking from class one afternoon when she was approached by “this tall guy with a huge head of hair and a beard” (apparently the beard was back).

“Hi, I'm Bill Clinton. Can I borrow your notes?” the young man said to Nancy Bekavac.

“For what?” Bekavac asked.

“For everything,” he said.

“Are you in our class?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Well, where the hell've you been?” she asked. “We've been here since September!”

“Running the Joe Duffey campaign. We just lost,” he said.

“Well, why borrow my notes? Borrow Reich's. He's your friend, isn't he?”

“He writes too much,” Clinton said. “I want to borrow yours.”

“Okay, but I've got to take some stuff out of the notebooks.”

“What've you got in there, love letters?” he asked.

“Worse. Poems.”

Bekavac relented and gave Clinton all her notes for four courses. He copied them and gave them back. No one saw him devote much time to reading them. One of his housemates, Bill Coleman, worried about Clinton in the weeks before final exams when it seemed that he had not opened a book. But Clinton was “
as nonchalant
about it as can be. He almost made fun of my worry for him.” Late at night, in the back of the house, Coleman would sometimes stumble across Clinton reading and gasp: “Oh, God, you're finally reading your procedures book!” But it would turn out to be a novel. Once it was Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past
. In the morning, Coleman would find Clinton in the same place, reading another novel. It was not that Clinton never studied. He studied at odd hours, briefly, with
great intensity, according to another housemate, Don Pogue. “
He was
very quick. I would love to know how fast he could read. He would get through more in an hour of concentrated effort than just about anybody I've ever seen. And he never slept much. If he slept more than four and a half hours a night, I'd be surprised.”

Clinton rarely attending class, working day and night on the Duffey campaign for months, was not particularly out of the ordinary at Yale Law. One student worked full time for the mayor's office in New York City for the three years that he was in law school—and got his degree. Steve Cohen, a political activist in the class two years ahead of Clinton's,
entered Yale
Law in 1968 so exhausted from several political campaigns that he never went to class during his first year and a half in New Haven. It was not simply the relaxed grading system that made Yale Law a haven for political activists. Yale Law was considered a center of progressive thought, especially in comparison with Harvard Law, which was three times as large and more rigid and conservative. Relating the law to society was at the core of Yale's academic mission. Faculty and students were involved in storefront legal clinics and model cities programs dealing with welfare and poverty in New Haven. Students were encouraged to take courses at the university outside the law curriculum, and members of the law faculty were noted for their expertise in other areas ranging from economics to psychology.

Rather than demanding memorization and legal exactitude, many professors emphasized interpreting broad concepts. “
In exams
the concern was more whether you could get the policy argument right than get the right citations in a case,” recalled Robert Borosage, then a leading radical student at Yale Law. “So for people with conceptual minds, like Clinton, it was pretty easy.” James Blair, an Arkansas attorney who became a close friend years later, remembered Clinton telling him about his experience in a corporate law course. “
He never
went to class and studied for the final at the last minute. When he got there, he learned that it was an open book test. The first thing Bill had to do was go get the book. So he started thirty minutes late. And somehow he still did well on the test. So the professor called him in and asked, ‘How did you do this?' And Bill said, ‘Corporate law is a lot like politics and I understand politics. It's just a case of making sure each employer gets something out of it.'”