First In His Class (57 page)

Clinton solicited advice from other experienced political observers. Most encouraged him to run while holding out little promise that he could win. “
I don't
see how you can raise the money to make the race,” said attorney James Blair, a major political powerbroker in northwest Arkansas who was managing Senator Fulbright's reelection campaign that year. McLarty, the state party chairman, considered Hammerschmidt “a wonderful man” who was “well regarded and well respected,” and not a top-priority target for the Democrats. Blair's future wife, Diane Kincaid, a political science professor at Arkansas who had met Clinton during the 1972 presidential campaign, noted the poor showing of previous challengers to Hammerschmidt but thought that Clinton was the first “plausible candidate” to surface in eight years in that he “
looked like
a congressman” and “understood national issues and the dynamics of the district.”

Clinton was not easily discouraged. He told Blair that he would overcome his financial disadvantage by working harder. In Arkansas, that meant traveling to every town in the district and meeting as many voters as possible and asking them for their votes. The concept of retail politics was
a sacred political belief in Arkansas.
The political
folk wisdom included a statistical component: it was estimated that 60 percent of the people voted for the candidate who met them first and asked them for their vote. Clinton thought he could ask that many. He also assumed that the Watergate scandal would help.

Watergate influenced Clinton's career decision in more ways than one. In December 1973, just as he was attempting to gauge how the scandal would play in the hills of northwest Arkansas, Clinton was offered a position as a staff lawyer for the House impeachment inquiry staff. Under the direction of former Justice Department official John Doar, the inquiry staff was being formed as an adjunct to the House Judiciary Committee to sort out the Watergate evidence and make the legal case for Nixon's impeachment. In building his staff, Doar recruited heavily from Yale Law School, where graduates were recommended to him by Burke Marshall, his former colleague injustice's civil rights division. Clinton and Hillary Rodham were on Marshall's list. Clinton would later say that he considered the offer “a great temptation” and “a great opportunity—one that just about any young attorney would've given anything for”—but there is no evidence that he spent much time debating his options. David Pryor, who was working as a lawyer in Little Rock and beginning a campaign for governor, later recalled Clinton visiting him one day and asking whether being associated with the impeachment staff would have any negative implications in Arkansas. Interestingly, according to Pryor, Clinton put the question in terms of his friend Rodham and his relationship with her. “He talked to me about Hillary going to work for the Watergate committee,” Pryor recalled. “He asked, ‘
Is that
a good idea?' It was a career consideration. He knew that his career would be in politics and the question was whether Hillary's connection with the Watergate committee might have political ramifica-tions.”

D
URING
his lunch hour one day in early January 1974, Clinton sat in his cramped third-floor office at Waterman Hall placing telephone calls. One call went to Ron Addington, a doctoral student and instructor in the school of education who was interested in politics and had told a mutual acquaintance that he wanted to meet Clinton. “
Why don't
you come over and let's visit,” Clinton said when he reached him. They had common bonds. They were born within a month of each other in 1946 in the same area; Addington grew up in DeQueen some thirty-five miles from Hope. He was an Army reservist, conservative in dress, bearing and haircut. Clinton was wearing blue jeans, leather moccasin boots, a checkered shirt with a tie, and a corduroy sports jacket. His hair was long and curly. His appearance
did not match Addington's expectations, which were closer to “the stereotype of a person who runs for office.” But the two clicked, and Addington agreed to help Clinton prepare for his race for Congress.

Later that week, Clinton asked Addington to travel with him for a day of political meetings in Russellville, an important city in the congressional district some three hours away on the road to Little Rock.
The journey
ended in embarrassment. After meeting various political officials in town all day, Clinton and Addington were taken to dinner at the local country club as the guests of a wealthy attorney and political powerbroker whom Clinton was intent on recruiting to his side. As the dinner conversation dragged on, it became clear that Clinton was getting tipsy. Never much of a drinker, he was politely downing his drinks with everyone else at the table. His sentences became less and less understandable. It was clear to Addington that Clinton could not drink and remain coherent. In the car on the way back to Fayetteville, Addington scolded Clinton for his behavior. “I don't know whether you can drink while campaigning,” he said. “Don't try it again.” The lesson was brought home soon enough when the attorney endorsed another candidate.

Addington was
in Little Rock, spending the weekend with his girlfriend, when Clinton called him from Fayetteville on the Sunday morning of February 24.

“I'm announcing tomorrow,” Clinton said.

“Tomorrow?” Addington gasped.

“Yeah. We're setting up some press conferences.”

“Okay, let's do it!” Addington said.

That was Clinton, he thought: impetuous, hungry, thinking that he could conquer the world in a day. And this was not even a normal day. It was a Sunday. And Clinton wanted press conferences in four cities—Hot Springs, his home town; Little Rock, the state capital and headquarters for the state political press corps; Fort Smith, the largest city in the Third District; and Fayetteville, Clinton's new base. Addington told Clinton that he would go to work on rounding up the press and meet Clinton in Russellville, a midpoint in the triangle between Little Rock, where Addington was staying, Fayetteville, where Clinton was, and Hot Springs, where they would both spend the night in preparation for the first press conference the next morning.
They agreed
to meet at the AQ Chicken House in Russellville that afternoon. First Addington called Doug Wallace, the editor of the University of Arkansas student newspaper, who was part of Clinton's team, and who had already spent Friday and Saturday preparing press packets. Then Addington got in the car with his girlfriend and headed north. When they reached the Chicken House, Addington hopped out and said goodbye to his girlfriend, who drove on to Fayetteville alone. From a telephone
outside the restaurant, Addington began tracking down reporters to let them know the plans for the next day.

Clinton arrived in his Gremlin, late, and he and Addington headed out over the mountain from Russellville to Hot Springs, one of the most perilous, twisting drives in Arkansas. Halfway through the trip, Addington turned to Clinton and said, “If we survive, you are never going to drive again when I'm in the car!” Clinton was driving as he always drove, carelessly, talking and gesturing the whole time, his eyes often off the road, every now and then swerving wildly into the oncoming lane or running his right tires onto the shoulder. The car had no passing power, but Clinton would try to pass anyway, usually when he was chugging uphill heading into a blind curve.

At eight
o'clock on Monday morning in frigid twenty-two-degree weather, sixty Clinton friends and relatives gathered at the Avanelle Motor Lodge in Hot Springs for the announcement. Ten relatives from the Clinton family were there, along with the parents of his high school friends: Phil Jamison's mother, Ronnie Cecil's father, Jim French's dad. Elizabeth Buck, Clinton's old Latin teacher, stood in the back near Virgil Spurlin, his high school band director. Here, at long last, was the opening moment of Bill Clinton's political career. He went after Hammerschmidt right away, ignoring the three other candidates for the Democratic nomination. He characterized Hammerschmidt as a close political ally of Nixon's and tried to link him to Watergate by saying, “Of all the men in Congress, he is one of those who has allowed the President to go as far as he has.” If the people “demand more honest politics,” Clinton declared, “they'll get more honest politics.”

His mother Virginia was nearby. “
All smiles
,” as Addington remembered her. “All smiles and laughing.”

C
ARL
Whillock's old card file was not the only valuable collection of names that Clinton turned to when he began his electoral career. He already had a file of his own, a cardboard box stuffed with alphabetized and annotated index cards listing the addresses and telephone numbers of classmates, professors, political organizers, and others he had encountered during his long apprenticeship. He spent time each night combing through the file, placing telephone calls, and writing notes to friends who might help his campaign.

Two years earlier, while working for McGovern in Texas, he had told Houston organizer Billie Carr that he was going home to Arkansas to begin a political career that would culminate with a run for president. Now he called her and said proudly, “Billie, I'
m on
my way!” He also called Bob
Armstrong and John C. White and Taylor Branch, who was back in Washington serving as the Washington editor of
Harper's
magazine. Though Branch by then had soured some on electoral politics and was hardly wealthy,
he responded
by contributing $250. It was, in a sense, a one-man phone bank and direct-mail operation. Most of Clinton's friends from Georgetown, Oxford, Yale, and Texas took note of the inevitable—their irrepressible pal Clinton had finally begun his lifetime race—and chuckled as they took his call or opened his letter. For the most part, they were charmed. Clinton was the master of the soft sell. He remembered the smallest details of people's lives, and his deftness at personalizing the notes tended to overcome whatever unseemliness might otherwise have tainted a blatantly political contact.

A letter he sent to Charlie Daniels, the plumbing contractor from Norton, Virginia, who had met Clinton four years earlier at the National Hotel in Moscow, stands as a perfect example of how Clinton would present himself: good-humored, humble, flattering, familiar:
Dear Charlie,”
he began.

I don't know if you'll remember me but this is the last day of the week we were together in Moscow four years ago now. I have been thinking of you, as I always do this time of year…. I am about to embark on a campaign for Congress against an entrenched GOP incumbent. I remember thinking when we were together what a campaigner you'd be—You're sure welcome here. Ha! My mother has never forgotten your thoughtful phone call upon your return from Russia. All the best, Bill Clinton.

Daniels was a registered Republican, but from then on, Clinton was his man. He visited Arkansas often, and even more often sent Clinton campaign checks.

The return
rate on Clinton's personal direct-mail effort was uneven. Many of his young friends sent donations of between $10 and $50. “Sorry I couldn't send more,” wrote Garry Mauro, who headed the Students for McGovern effort in Texas in 1972. Women friends old and new seemed to be reliable sources. Hillary Rodham wrote out two early checks for $400. Lyda Holt chipped in with $125. The Leckford Road connection was also fruitful. Strobe Talbott contributed $300, as did Brooke Shearer. The rest of the Shearer family, who served as Clinton's hosts when he visited California, also supported his congressional bid. Brooke's brothers, Derek and Cody, both journalists, gave a total of $450, and her mother, Marva Shearer, contributed $200. The first $10,000 of his campaign came from a source closer to home: a Hot Springs bank loan co-signed by his uncle Raymond Clinton and Gabe Crawford of the Oaklawn Pharmacy.

•  •  •

T
HE
Third District was more than Fayetteville, Fort Smith, and Hot Springs. Most of the twenty-one county district lay out in the northern hills, the region that Clinton and Paul Fray had targeted as the key to the election during their meeting in early December. It was a vast rural region steeped in country folkways. To get to Washington, Clinton would have to travel deep into the backwaters of his native state. At an organizational meeting of Clinton supporters in Fayetteville a few days after the announcement, Carl Whillock unfolded a map of Arkansas and traced the two-lane roads and highways leading from one county seat to another in the Third District. He knew the distances from town to town: with twists and turns through the hills, destinations were always far longer in minutes than in miles. Each time his hand stopped at a town, Whillock had a story to tell about a friend in the courthouse or at the weekly newspaper. He proposed that he and Clinton spend a day together driving through the hills from courthouse to courthouse.

They left
at dawn on Wednesday, March 6. Whillock had not prearranged any meetings for the trip. He knew the daily patterns of the people he wanted Clinton to meet. They would be where they always were, and no matter wh
at the
y were doing they would have time for an old friend. The political explorers headed north and east out of Fayetteville on Highway 62 until they reached Berryville, a town that Whillock knew intimately as the home town of his former boss, the late congressman Trimble. The rural essence of the district Clinton sought to represent was brought home to him at this first stop. Berryville was a county seat of Carroll County—not the county seat but a county seat. There were two county seats, with their own separate courthouses: Eureka Springs on the western side of the Kings River and Berryville on the eastern side—a vestige of the days, not so long ago in these parts of Arkansas, when rivers were difficult to cross. At the Berryville courthouse they met Eileen Harvey, the circuit court clerk and recorder of deeds, who cherished the memory of Trimble as her “dearest friend” and had once been a member of the same church as Whillock. “Carl tells me you know how to run in these hills,” Clinton said to Harvey. He asked Harvey for her help. She gave it, not only offering to take him around the county, even across the Kings River, but also persuading her daughter to work in Clinton's county campaign. “We hit it off,” Harvey said later. “He loved people and loved campaigning and I did too. Politics is nothing more than a selling game.”