First In His Class (54 page)

“Oh you are, are you?” Carr replied.

T
HE
longer the campaign went on, the more it became obvious to Taylor Branch that he and Clinton had different political temperaments. To Branch, the campaign began to seem like “
an endless
fight over who got what.” There was great sensitivity about which group or leader seemed to be getting preference. “We were always doing the wrong thing. If I did something for one group, others would complain.” The low point for Branch came one afternoon in Houston when he was attending a black political event near the airport. Black leaders, led by state Senator Barbara Jordan, who was running for Congress and had just been named vice-chair of the state party, were upset that Chicanos had been granted a meeting with McGovern while blacks had only been able to meet with Shriver. “
They were
furious for pure status reasons,” Branch recalled, “and told me that they would disendorse the ticket unless I diverted McGovern's plane and brought him to Houston.” Branch told Jordan he would see what he could do. He excused himself from the gathering and called Steve Robbins and Tony Podesta, the schedulers. He explained the situation, but they told him the demand was ridiculous: there was no way they could divert the plane. Branch returned to the meeting and told Jordan that he had tried to persuade Washington to bring McGovern to Houston, but they had decided that diverting the plane was out of the question.

Jordan turned on Branch, he later recalled, and with her slow, precise, stern phrasing, she declared: “The
reason
that
you
did not get the
message
across with
sufficient clarity
so that they could
understand
the
message
is because
you
…
young man
… are a
racist!
”

Branch felt intimidated and upset. “I made your position as clear as possible,” he said. Then he called Washington again. McGovern could not go to Houston immediately, but it was agreed that he would visit the black group soon—“and in the end,” Branch remembered, “they had the meeting.”

But if Branch asked himself, “Is this really worth it?,” Clinton thrived. Branch concluded that “he was more interested in the game than I was, that's the heart of the matter.
He liked
what we were doing. He liked those meetings. He absorbed backbiting better than I did.” Soon enough Clinton became renowned for his ability to settle factional disputes. Pat Robards, who worked at the Austin headquarters but came out of the fractious San Antonio region, saw that “every time a war broke out among ethnic groups,
they would have certain demands and Bill would mediate between them all.” The key to Clinton's success, according to Branch, was his ability to study the personalities of the people he was dealing with and determine what it took to get along with them, where their weak spots were, who was lazy, who was committed. “He was Johnsonian in that sense—knowing how to read personalities.”

In the final month, the Texas campaign turned from mere chaos and clamor to outright farce. Clinton spent more time in the Rio Grande Valley, where the ticket at least had a chance of carrying a few counties. In Shriver's
last visit
to the valley, his plane could not leave·, it was trapped on the runway for three hours as a pilot flying solo got disoriented in the foggy airspace above the airport, forcing the control tower to suspend operations as they tried to talk him down. Clinton knew that Shriver's delay could have serious consequences at his next destination, Texarkana, where Roy Spence had a television crew waiting amidst the crowd to film a final fundraising commercial that they hoped might evoke John Kennedy's boisterous rally there at the end of his 1960 campaign. But the fiasco in the valley prevented Shriver's plane from arriving in Texarkana until well after midnight. By that time most of the crowd had gone home. Spence shot the commercial anyway, staying up all night to edit it so that the crowd appeared large and buoyant.

The spot was a rousing appeal for East Texans to stand tall with the party of Roosevelt, Wright Patman, Sam Rayburn, and LBJ. They were urged to send donations to a post office box in Austin. A few days after the spot aired, in a heady burst of optimism,
Branch and
Clinton walked to the downtown post office with a troop of colleagues from the headquarters, expecting to discover a stack of envelopes filled with checks. The post office box was empty. They returned the next day, and again it was empty. After that, an embarrassed Branch went alone. The following week, he discovered one envelope. He brought it back to the office and had the staff gather around for the ceremonial opening. “With great fanfare” and high expectations, Branch opened the package. Inside was a piece of toilet paper smeared with human excrement and a note declaring that the contents reflected what East Texans thought of George McGovern.

Yet paradoxically in those final weeks, as the evidence mounted that Nixon would be reelected in a landslide, the national McGovern campaign was awash in money. The direct-mail fund-raising operation was generating an astounding 25 percent return in a field where 3 percent was considered average. “
We had
this huge cadre of people who were desperately committed to George McGovern and thought he was the messiah who would end the war in Vietnam,” recalled Tony Podesta. “
It was
like a Ponzi scheme in the end. We couldn't count the money fast enough.” One night a McGovern adviser in the Washington office noticed thirty canvas bags in a back
room amid various debris. “What's in those bags?” he asked. Trash, he was told. He opened a bag and found it stuffed with envelopes containing checks and cash—hundreds of thousands of dollars that might have gone straight from the hearts of true believers to the incinerators of the nation's capital. The money instead was sent out to targeted states, including Texas.

“It was unbelievable. It was not smart money, but emotional money,” according to Roy Spence, who spent as much as he could on Texas media buys. Spence's partner,
Judy Trabulsi,
camped out at the Western Union office in Austin, a telephone in one hand, buying time on radio stations and simultaneously wiring them payments. Two nights before the election, Bebe Champ drove by the Sixth Street headquarters.
The lights
were off, but she stopped to see if anyone was inside and found the front door open. She walked past the reception area and down the hall to Clinton's office, where a small desk lamp provided the only light. Clinton seemed startled when Champ appeared at the doorway. She asked him what he was doing. The answer was in the dimness: Stacks of money were piled on his old wooden desk, cash that had come in from Washington for get-out-the-vote efforts on election day. Clinton was sorting it: this pile for San Antonio, this for Houston, this for the Valley. “I've got to get all this money out of here by tomorrow morning,” he said.

It was of no use in the endcash—not the money, not the sixteen visits that McGovern and Shriver paid to the state, not the talents of Clinton and Branch. On November 7, Nixon crushed McGovern in Texas, winning 67 percent of the vote on his way to one of the most lopsided victories in American presidential history.

A few
days after the election, Clinton and Branch and the rest of the Sixth Street gang drove out to Bob Armstrong's ranch near Liberty Hill on the outskirts of Austin and spent one long last evening together. They played touch football and sat around a campfire and sang to the accompaniment of Armstrong's guitar. Clinton crooned a few Elvis tunes and Branch sang “Rocky Raccoon.” Most of the people there, according to Mark Bsumenthal, were in “altered states of consciousness induced by the heavy disappointment that we lost so badly.” Bottles of Jack Daniel's were passed around the campfire along with “a couple of joints.”

Each one had a different way of dealing with loss. Franklin Garcia told Branch that he seemed to be in serious emotional distress. “
You need
to go hunting,” Garcia told him. “Shoot a bird so that you don't think everything is so fragile.” Branch would later head back to Washington and consider writing a book called “The Future of American Decadence,” a title which, though it related to a wholly different subject, the underworld of agents and drug dealers in Miami, nonetheless seemed a perfect reflection of his mood in the aftermath of the campaign.

Betsey Wright was hired by Creekmore Fath, the liberal benefactor, to
run an office whose purpose was to keep Sissy Farenthold's name politically alive. But soon, at Hillary Rodham's urging,
Wright headed
up to Washington to work for the National Women's Political Caucus, a point from which she dreamed of helping Rodham begin a long march to the White House.

Mark Blumenthal left for India in search of
a six-year-old
guru. “If America is going to buy Nixon again,” he told friends before leaving. “I don't want anything to do with this.”

Clinton lingered in Austin for several days after the election. He seemed to be in no hurry to return to Yale Law School, where he was enrolled as a third-year student but had not yet set foot in a classroom for his third year. “Aren'
t you
worried about classes?” Bebe Champ asked him. “Nah, it's okay,” he replied. One afternoon he was seen carefully going through all the mailing lists and files and letters, transferring names and telephone numbers to his growing personal file of index cards.

W
HAT
did his experience in Texas mean to Clinton? He certainly could have spent that summer and fall working for McGovern in Arkansas, where he was planning to begin his political career, or in Connecticut, where he was in law school. “
Coming down
to Texas had to be part of an agenda,” thought Pat Robards. “It helped him enlarge his base. He made contacts here that he maintained. From then on, we'd all get postcards and fundraising newsletters from him.” Even Mark Blumenthal, the hippie radioman, kept receiving postcards from Clinton after he left Texas. “
When he
was traveling, these postcards would come in the mail,” Blumenthal recalled. “He'd send them to me, and I was a nobody. When I got one, I said to my wife, ‘This guy's going somewhere.ߣ”

Clinton learned an unforgettable lesson in the value of nurturing contacts, according to Roy Spence. “
He learned
from that race the power of a network; McGovern didn't have one, and it hurt him.” Beyond Texas, the McGovern campaign proved invaluable to the Democratic party as an incubator for many of the party's finest organizers, strategists, and policy theorists over the following two decades, people who served as the support staff for the two McGovern aides who later entered the national electoral realm: first Gary Hart and then Clinton. Texas also provided Clinton a training ground to sharpen his skills dealing with contentious factions within the Democratic party, where he learned how difficult and petty politics could be, and what it took to survive. He came away with a stronger commitment to becoming involved.

As George McGovern watched his young protégé evolve over the ensuing decades, he would note another lesson that Clinton learned from the campaign, a reinforcement, actually, of a political reality that had first
become clear to Clinton in Joe Duffey's campaign two years earlier. “
He seemed
to take away the lesson of not being caught too far out on the left on defense, welfare, crime. From then on he would take steps to make sure those were marketed in a way to appeal to conservatives and moderates.” But in Clinton's heart of hearts, McGovern believed then and later, he would always remain “closer to where we were in '72 than the public thinks.”

N
OT
long after he got back to New Haven, Clinton wrote a letter to Creekmore Fath in Austin thanking him for his help and recalling the campaign with a certain wistfulness. “
I wonder
what's going on in Texas,” he closed the November 25 letter. “I must confess I miss it and that lost, bumbling battle of ours.” One night during that period he visited the house on Crown Street where Bob Reich and Nancy Bekavac lived and spent several hours delivering an emotional soliloquy on his Texas days.
He sat
in the living room on their soft, tattered couch, wearing his huge blue winter coat and a grungy white-knit sweater, and described how Lyndon Johnson had gotten fat and grown his hair out and almost looked like a hippie, and how the old LBJ and Roosevelt coalition was breaking up and there seemed to be a meanness in the country. Bekavac recalled that “there was this sense of identification Bill had with the passing of the Age of Titans. It wasn't a point-by-point analysis and refutation of what had happened in Texas, but more an evocation of what was no longer out there. He translated that into how difficult it would make his own rise in a southern state. He had been part of the largest, most lopsided defeat in American politics. The meaning of this was not lost on him.”

For the second time in three years Clinton returned from a political campaign to Yale Law School, and once again he had no trouble passing his courses. The only grades came from final exams and papers, and Clinton managed to master them in a few intense weeks of cramming. His academic record at Yale was “very good but not outstanding,”
according to
a summary that was later sent to the University of Arkansas Law School when he applied for a job there. Many Yale Law students felt that the third year of studies was excessive in any case; they had learned all they needed to know in the first two years. For Hillary Rodham, who had extended her law school career to four years, the final year was even less demanding, allowing her to focus first on the McGovern campaign and then on her work in children's rights.

As their law school years neared an end, the class of 1973 went through one final mood swing that spring. Now, at last, Watergate was the big story. At the end of each day the students would bunch together in the lounge
and watch the unraveling of the Nixon administration on the nightly news.
Bill Coleman
felt “a sense of hope” just as they were leaving law school, “a harbinger of the possibility of change.” The team of Rodham and Clinton served together that spring on the board of the Barristers Union, running the Prize Trials. One day Clinton showed up at a board meeting with his hair trimmed and wearing white bucks. He was, thought Robert Alsdorf, who also served on the board, rehearsing for his journey home, back to Arkansas and a life in politics. Alsdorf took one look at Clinton and said, “
Let me
know when you're running for president, Bill. I'll help you.”