First In His Class (62 page)

Before his eyes he saw what could happen to a politician who failed to connect with ordinary people during that first spring of his electoral career when the state's Democratic primary voters denied J. William Fulbright the nomination, unsentimentally ending his thirty-year career in the Senate.
Fulbright had
raised and spent more money than any previous candidate in Arkansas and barely received one-third of the vote as he was over-whelmed by Dale Bumpers, the popular governor. Bumpers had an 85 percent approval rating while Fulbright's was in the low 30s. The polls showed that voters no longer accepted Fulbright's stature in international affairs as a sufficient trade-off for his indifference to local concerns. The unease about Fulbright's distance from his constituents had increased year by year. Now, finally, all efforts by his staff to make him seem like a regular guy were futile. They presented him as plain old Bill and outfitted him in flannel shirts, but the people had already decided that Fulbright was no longer one of them.

Clinton intended
to assist Fulbright during the primary, according to
James Blair, the senator's campaign manager, but became so involved in his own campaign that he never got around to helping his old boss. On the campaign trail, he more often found himself associating with Pryor and Bumpers when they stumped in the Third Congressional District. Arkansas political observers taking their first look at Clinton saw elements of Pryor and Bumpers in his style. He had Pryor's ability to work a room, and Bumpers's power to sway a crowd as an extemporaneous speaker. As the campaign wore on, the resemblances became more apparent: Clinton would study the two men, borrow a colloquialism from one, a hand gesture from the other, and incorporate them in his routine. It is not a contradiction to say that he was both a natural politician and an artful imitator, for those two types may in fact be one and the same; natural politicians are skilled actors, recreating reality, adjusting and ad-libbing, synthesizing the words, ideas, and feelings of others, slipping into different roles in different scenes, saying the same thing over and over again and making it seem like they are saying it for the first time. It can be at once a creative art yet wholly derivative, which is the best way to understand Bill Clinton's political persona as he reached the public stage.

In early July, after he had secured the Democratic nomination, Clinton went to Hot Springs for his ten-year high school reunion, the first time that the class of 1964 had reconvened.
The theme
of the reunion at the Velda Rose Hotel was “The Way We Were,” the title song of that year's nostalgic film starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. Photographs from the Old Gold yearbook lined the banquetroom walls. The
Hot Springs Sentinel-Record
described Clinton as “
the most
prominent graduate”—a Rhodes Scholar, University of Arkansas law professor, and Democratic candidate for Congress. He was seated at the front table along with his friend Phil Jamison, the class president, a naval lieutenant at Pensacola who had flown helicopters in Vietnam. The article noted that Carolyn Yeldell had now married and was teaching music in Indiana, and that Jim French, the quarterback, was in New Orleans training to be a doctor. David Leopoulos, Clinton's closest childhood friend, had begun a job at a community college in Florida. Of those present, there were twenty-one housewives, two lawyers, nine engineers, four secretaries, one minister, four bankers, and four doctors. “
Lots of
them,” Clinton was quoted as saying of his classmates, “are doing impressive things I haven't done.”

Clinton delivered a brief speech, but the crowd seemed to have little interest in politics. At the ten-year point, Jamison found that his classmates did not seem particularly interested in looking backward or forward, but were “caught in the here and now, trying to make their way.” After the dinner, Clinton spent most of the night on the dance floor, enjoying himself with a string of old girlfriends. But not everyone was lost in the moment.
Jamison was
cornered in the hallway by Rodney Wilson, a former Marine and Vietnam veteran. At first they traded war stories as though they were recalling old memories from high school, but the more Wilson talked, the more intense he became. He seemed depressed, and said he felt out of place and mistreated since his return from Vietnam.

Clinton, too, was still haunted by Vietnam that summer. The manner in which he had avoided military service in 1969 might be raised by John Paul Hammerschmidt's campaign. Hammerschmidt was a World War II Air Force pilot who strongly supported the war and had close ties to veterans“ groups in the district.
The documentary
record of Clinton's actions after he received his draft notice at Oxford five years earlier, including the letter to Colonel Holmes in which he thanked Holmes for eventually saving him from the draft, rested in a file inside a fireproof half-ton vault at the University of Arkansas ROTC building a few blocks down the hill from the law school. Clinton's usual response to anyone who asked him about his military record was that he had received a high draft number in the lottery and was never called. He discussed the more complicated details of his draft history, and the letter to Holmes, with only a few friends. One was Paul Fray. “
He told
me what he said in the letter about the war,” Fray said later. “I told him that he could get into a pickle if the Republicans got the letter and that he should try to get the original back.”

Colonel Holmes had retired, and was living in northwest Arkansas. How Clinton contacted him and persuaded him to return the letter is unclear. Some members of the ROTC staff believe that Clinton relied on intermediaries from the university administration, where he had several friends and political supporters. Decades later, the colonel would label Clinton a draft dodger and claim that he had been deceived by the young man, but the evidence indicates that in 1974 he was still willing to help Clinton. ROTC drill instructor Ed Howard later recalled that Colonel Holmes called him one morning that summer and “said he wanted the Clinton letter out of the files.” Howard, a noncommissioned officer, was alone in the office; most of the staff was at summer training at Fort Riley, Kansas.
He called
the unit commander, Colonel Guy Tutwiler, at Fort Riley and informed him of Holmes's request. Tutwiler instructed Howard to make a copy of the Clinton letter and give it to Holmes, but to keep the original. A member of Holmes's family stopped by the ROTC headquarters and picked up the letter.

Later that afternoon, Tutwiler called Howard again and told him to take the original letter and everything else in that file, which was among the records the ROTC had maintained on Vietnam War-era dissidents, and to send it to him at Fort Riley by certified mail.
According to
Howard, Tutwiler later explained that he had “destroyed the file, burned the file,”
because the military no longer maintained dissident files and
he did
not feel that Clinton's letter should ever “be used against him for political reasons.” According to Fray, Clinton ended up with a copy of his letter to Holmes, and assumed that “the situation was done with.” He did not know that Holmes's top aide, Lieutenant Colonel Clinton Jones, had already made a copy of the letter.

O
N
Friday, August 9, the day that President Nixon resigned, Clinton was campaigning in the northeastern end of the congressional district. He arrived in Mountain Home that evening for the third day of his stay with Mike and Suzanne Lee, who had made their home his regional headquarters.
The Lees
were old friends who had been in the class behind his at Hot Springs High. Mike had attended the Naval Academy with Phil Jamison, and he and Jamison had stayed at Clinton's Georgetown room whenever they could escape Annapolis for the weekend.

It was all part of the easy reciprocity of Clinton's world. He never had any money, he was always living off the grace of friends, yet his give-and-take spirit made it possible for him to sleep at other people's houses and clean out their refrigerators because he was bound to repay them with some act of generosity down the line. Now he was at the Lees' house in Mountain Home and the American political world was turning upside down. He sat in the living room and watched as Nixon announced that he was leaving the White House. Well after midnight, a reporter for the
Arkansas Gazette
called the house. Suzanne answered and went to the guest bedroom, awakening Clinton. He went to the kitchen to take the call, leaning against the wall, still half-asleep. It was, Suzanne said later, “amazing to listen to him. It was just like a rehearsed speech that he had been waiting to give. I couldn't believe he could do it right out of a deep sleep.” But Clinton would not say publicly what he thought about Nixon's resignation: that it was good for the country but bad for him. “This is going to cost me the race,” he confided to Mike Lee. The convulsions of Nixon's resignation, he said, would make the voters of northwest Arkansas less inclined to throw Hammerschmidt out.

Throughout that summer of the Watergate inquiry, Clinton had emphasized Hammerschmidt's friendship and support of Nixon. The Republican congressman tried to argue that “the people are tired of Watergate,” but most evidence was to the contrary. Watergate filled up so much space in the political world that there was little room left for other questions, such as whether Clinton was too young and too liberal for the electorate. The more the public turned against Nixon, the more Clinton gained momentum. When Nixon resigned, as Clinton predicted, his campaign “
went into
a stall,” according to press secretary Doug Wallace. “The voters stopped to catch their breath. Suddenly there was no Nixon to rail against.”

Nixon's resignation was one of three major transitions for Clinton and his campaign late that summer. One afternoon, Clinton'
s mother
came home from her hospital work with a carry-out dinner for her husband, Jeff Dwire, to discover him dead of heart failure brought on by diabetes. Dwire had been a soothing influence on Virginia during their five-year marriage. He was a charming dandy who enjoyed life and had had his own scrapes with the law, but he was kind to Virginia and her boys, and he made her happy in a way that no other man had since Bill Blythe. During his year in prison, he had become a jailhouse lawyer of sorts, acquiring enough knowledge to discuss legal subjects with Clinton and Rodham when they were at Yale. Dwire had been the one member of the family to accept Hillary warmly, a gesture that was reciprocated by Bill Clinton, who wrote a letter of support when Dwire unsuccessfully sought a pardon.

Everyone at
campaign headquarters knew Dwire. Shortly before he died, he had spent several days in Fayetteville answering the telephones and offering advice. Paul Fray noticed the flashy rings on Dwire's fingers and worried about what the Hammerschmidt forces would do if they learned that he was assisting the campaign. “The last thing we needed was for word to get out about Clinton's stepfather with a prison record.”

Dwire's death and Nixon's resignation were matters of consequence, yet in terms of their sustained effect on Clinton, they could not compare with the third event of late summer, the arrival of Hillary Rodham, who provoked a complicated set of reactions in her boyfriend and the people around him. On one level, Clinton feared that Rodham was too much of a potential political star to make the sacrifice of living in Arkansas. Once, earlier,
when Clinton
told Diane Kincaid, the political science professor at Arkansas, how much she reminded him of Rodham and made him miss her, the professor asked him why he did not just marry Rodham and bring her to Arkansas. “Because she's so good at what she does, she could have an amazing political career on her own,” Clinton said. “If she comes to Arkansas it's going to be my state, my future. She could be president someday. She could go to any state and be elected to the Senate. If she comes to Arkansas, she'll be on my turf.”

That turf, Clinton realized, could appear inhospitable to his Yankee girlfriend. His mother and younger brother made little effort to hide their distaste for her. Whenever the Frays visited Hot Springs during the campaign, Virginia would complain to them about Hillary. “
Virginia loathed
Hillary then,” Mary Lee Fray recalled. “Anything she could find to pick on about Hillary she would pick on. Hillary did not fit her mold for Bill.” But even if it was not a natural fit, Clinton seemed determined to lure her to
stay in Arkansas. He encouraged his friends and political aides to make her feel welcome. “
She was
someone you had great expectations for and wanted to know because Bill kept talking about her,” recalled Rudy Moore.

Yet at the same time that Clinton was earnestly recruiting Rodham to his state,
he was
still involved with the student volunteer, a relationship that had been going on for several months. The tension at campaign headquarters increased considerably when Rodham arrived as people there tried to deal with the situation. Both women seemed on edge. The Arkansas girlfriend would ask people about Hillary: what she was like, and whether Clinton was going to marry her. When she was at headquarters, someone would sneak her out the back door if Rodham was spotted pulling into the driveway. Mary Lee Fray, who liked both women, felt trapped in the middle of the triangle. She remembers times when Clinton wanted her to chaperone the Arkansas girlfriend and make sure that there were no confrontations with Hillary. “Bill would say, ‘
Go take
her somewhere. Get lost,'” Fray recalled later. “It would put me in a funny position. He'd say, ‘Go do something. Move it. Scoot it.' He'd get us out of there.” If Clinton had made it clear that Rodham was his only romantic interest, Fray thought, the other woman would have disappeared. But Clinton would not say anything so direct.

Fayetteville, a university town, was the most culturally liberal enclave in Arkansas, but the mores of the wider Third Congressional District made it politically impractical for Clinton to live with a woman outside of marriage.
Rodham took
her own place when she arrived. She rented a three-bedroom house, an architectural showpiece replicating a Frank Lloyd Wright design, bow-shaped and glassy, full of odd-shaped rooms, with a large swimming pool in the backyard. The house belonged to Rafael Guzman, who was on temporary leave from the law school to teach in Iowa, where he was soon joined by his wife, Terry Kirkpatrick, who had served with Rodham on the impeachment inquiry staff. The place quickly looked like campaign headquarters, with Clinton signs everywhere.