First In His Class (68 page)

A few
weeks later, Pryor invited Clinton to ride with him from the state Capitol to Hot Springs, where the governor was to deliver a speech. Clinton had been seeking a private meeting where the two men could talk about their political futures, and Pryor decided that now was the time. They sat in the back seat of the state-owned Lincoln and chatted all the way down and back, and then went on to the Governor's Mansion and talked some more. At the start of the discussion, Pryor could not tell whether Clinton wanted to run for senator or governor. He made the first move. “I told him that I was planning to run for the Senate,” Pryor recalled. He said he hoped Clinton would not join the already crowded field. Clinton “opened up” to Pryor as the conversation progressed. With Bumpers and Pryor both ahead of him, he said, he feared that he might find his career stymied.

“Bill,” Pryor told Clinton, seeking to reassure him, “
you could
run for governor and be elected and serve longer than Orval Faubus,” who was in the Governor's Mansion for six two-year terms from 1955 to 1967. “You could break Faubus's record” For the rest of the conversation, Clinton asked Pryor questions about what it was like to be governor. He did not say what was really on his mind: he would settle for governor, this time, but he had no interest in breaking Faubus's record in Little Rock.

From the moment Clinton announced for governor, he began running two campaigns at once. In public, he was the candidate for governor, facing token opposition in the Democratic primary against four relative unknowns. He easily garnered support from labor and business, and was
hailed as “
the only
truly distinguished figure” in the field by the
Arkansas Gazette
, though the editorial writers there occasionally upbraided him for being too cautious. His opponents assaulted him for using the attorney general's office “as a political tool,” for “never working a day in his life,” and for having an assertive wife who would not use his last name.
Internal campaign
news summaries frequently noted that “the Name business,” as they called it, had surfaced in stories about Hillary Rodham. One candidate, Monroe Schwarzlose, an old turkey farmer, harrumphed about Rodham's law degree. “We've had enough lawyers in the Governor's Mansion,” he said. “One is enough. Two would be too much.” Another candidate, Frank Lady, blasted Rodham, saying there was an inherent conflict of interest between her membership in the Rose Law Firm and her position as the governor's wife.

Clinton reacted to these attacks with varying degrees of righteous anger. He exploded once at Lady, the candidate of the religious right, saying that Lady's “religious convictions tell him it is wrong to lie, but he does it anyway.” Another time he offered an emotional defense of Rodham. “
If people
knew how old-fashioned she was in every conceivable way,” he said. “She's just a hard-working, no-nonsense, no frills, intelligent girl who had done well, who doesn't see any sense to extramarital sex, who doesn't care much for drink, who's witty and sharp without being a stick in the mud. She's just great.”

But in private, Clinton worried little about his primary, which his polls showed he had clinched. He busied himself with another political role as back room strategist for Pryor's race in the Senate primary. He confided to a few friends and advisers that he wanted Pryor to defeat Jim Guy Tucker, whom he viewed as his main competition as the rising star of state Democratic politics. During Morris's frequent trips to Little Rock in the spring of 1978, he later recalled, he and Clinton would spend a few minutes talking about the governor's race, then spend hours
plotting how
Pryor could beat Tucker. Morris noticed something extraordinary about their discussions. They talked not like consultant and client, but like two consultants. He came to regard Clinton as “a highly sophisticated colleague” in the profession.

As Morris had predicted in his early polls for Clinton, Pryor proved to be vulnerable. On the night that Clinton swept the gubernatorial primary with nearly 60 percent of the vote, Pryor barely survived the Senate primary and was forced into a runoff with Tucker. Clinton, according to Morris, was becoming “increasingly frustrated with the Pryor campaign.” He complained that Pryor was “being too nice a guy and wasn't aggressive enough in the campaign.” For the two-week runoff, Tucker began a media campaign based on the theme that Pryor might be a nice guy to go fishing
with, but he was not an effective politician who could solve the state's and nation's pressing problems. Clinton,
the back
room political consultant, spent hours devising a response that would show Pryor's strength. When the firemen in Arkansas had threatened to strike, Pryor had said that he would call out the National Guard to replace them. He had acted boldly and decisively in a situation where another governor in another state had not and some fires had burned out of control. They could make an ad showing David Pryor standing tall. Clinton wrote out the ad copy and gave it to Dick Morris, who revised it and took it to Pryor, who authorized it.

Pryor felt uneasy about this outside consultant Clinton had brought into the campaign. He had rejected Morris's services earlier, and was only using him now because Clinton insisted on it. Pryor'
s wife,
Barbara, found Morris especially disagreeable and banned him from the Governor's Mansion. She thought he was too negative, too much of an operator. Clinton had no such qualms, at least not during the election season. His theory of politics, he told Morris, was that you do what you have to do to get elected. Pryor won the runoff.

Clinton still had a general election to win. The Republicans had put up an opponent this time, unlike the attorney general's race two years earlier. But it was not an even match. Lynn Lowe, a GOP official and farmer from Texarkana, was underfinanced and unknown. So confident were Clinton and his top campaign aides, Steve Smith and Rudy Moore, that they began preparing for his first year as governor.
They were
determined, Moore said, to “define and set the agenda for the legislature in 1979.”

W
ITH
Bill Clinton it is often tempting, but usually misleading, to try to separate the good from the bad, to say that the part of him that is indecisive, too eager to please and prone to deception, is more revealing of the inner man than the part of him that is indefatigable, intelligent, empathetic, and self-deprecating. They co-exist. There is a similar balance to his life's progression. In his worst times, one can see the will to recover and the promise of redemption. In his best times, one can see the seeds of disaster.

The final months of 1978 reflected the second of those two conditions. He was on the edge of glory. At the early age of thirty-two, he was the governor-apparent of Arkansas. He had a determined wife and a finely tuned political machine and an army of friends. He had come further, faster in the political world than any member of his generation. And yet it was in those promising days of 1978 that Clinton perplexed his aides by hanging out in racy nightclubs surrounded by admiring women. It was then that he and Rodham signed the first papers in a land deal along the White River
in the Ozark hills. It was then that Rodham entered the risky livestock commodities trading market and made a huge profit in a way that would later be questioned. And it was then that Clinton was confronted with accusations that he had dodged the draft.

Of those events, only the draft issue was played out in public at the time. The others seemed of less consequence then. Not that the draft story loomed particularly large either. It was not so much a crisis as a two-day problem, raised and dealt with and quickly forgotten—but not forever gone. In the final week of the campaign, Billy G. Geren, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, held a news conference on the steps of the state Capitol in which he accused Clinton of being a draft dodger.
Geren charged
that Clinton had received a draft deferment in 1969 by agreeing to join the University of Arkansas ROTC, but had then reneged on his promise and returned to Oxford University. The lieutenant colonel, who was accompanied to the press conference by a top aide to the Republican gubernatorial candidate, laid out the case.
Clinton easily
rebuffed the charge by offering a fuzzy response. He claimed that he had never received a draft deferment because he had canceled the agreement with the ROTC and reentered the draft pool before a deferment could be granted. When reporters asked Colonel Eugene Holmes, the former head of the ROTC program, about the incident, Holmes said that he could not remember the Clinton case. With no documents to substantiate either side, the issue disappeared.

Geren, who had served on the University of Arkansas ROTC staff from 1972 to 1976, was closer to making a strong case than Clinton or the press realized. He had heard about the letter that Clinton had written to Colonel Holmes from Oxford in which Clinton thanked the officer for saving him from the draft. But Geren could not find a copy of the letter. Ed Howard, who had been the drill sergeant on the ROTC staff and had left the service to sell real estate in Malvern, recalled that
Geren called
him at home late one night shortly before the press conference. “He told me they were looking into Clinton dodging the draft,” Howard said. “He knew that I knew about the Clinton file and the letter. He was trying to get me to help them. He wanted me to tell the press that I knew about it.”

Howard refused. He was a Clinton supporter by then and did not think the draft should be an issue in the governor's race. But the day after the press conference, when he read in the papers that Clinton denied ever receiving a draft deferment, Howard felt the same way that he had back in 1969 when he first heard about the letter to Colonel Holmes. “
I was
disappointed with Bill,” he recalled. “And angry—again.”

•  •  •

P
ROMISE
, pain, an augury of future trouble—they were all there again on election night in 1978.

The promise was evident in Clinton's overwhelming win. He swept the state with 63 percent of the vote and became the youngest governor in the United States in four decades.

The pain
came five minutes before the first evening news report on the election. Jim Ranchino, Clinton's friend and in-state pollster, who also served as an analyst for KATV in Little Rock, was exuberant that his numbers showed young Clinton scoring a resounding victory. An ebullient bear of a man, Ranchino had been slowed by what he thought was the flu that day but was eager to get on the air so that he could discuss the rise of Arkansas' bright new star. He never made it to the microphone. As he was walking up the stairs toward his seat in the studio, he was felled by a massive, fatal heart attack.

The omen
of future trouble came in a congratulatory note from President Carter, who wrote to Governor-elect Clinton: “You and I will succeed in meeting the goals for our country by working closely together to serve those whom we represent.”

CHAPTER TWENTY
 
GREAT EXPECTATIONS

B
ILL CLINTON WAS
ensconced in the back seat of a limousine transporting him in unaccustomed luxury through the ice-slicked streets of Little Rock.
At his
side was Dave Matter, an old friend from his undergraduate days at Georgetown. Matter had been the campaign manager for Clinton's first tough defeat, when he lost the student council presidency because his classmates had grown bored with his smooth patter and his ingratiating manner with the school establishment. Now, on this January night twelve years later, the two were reunited for Clinton's inauguration as the youngest governor in the United States since before World War II. As they rode from one event to the next, Clinton turned to Matter and professed surprise at what had become of his life. “Matter,” he said, in his soft, hoarse voice. “Did you ever think it would come to this?” For Matter, who had been invited into the limousine in one of Clinton's characteristic share-the-moment impulses, as for scores of other friends from various chapters of Clinton's life who converged on Little Rock for his ascension to the governorship, the answer was … yes, of course. Yes, of course, he would be Governor Clinton or Senator Clinton some day. And yes, of course, that might only be the beginning.