First In His Class (72 page)

Although Jim McDougal brought the Clintons in on the deal, his wife Susan was the most excited about the property, which the Clintons had never seen and never would bother to visit. Susan had picked it out and was convinced that the land would pay for itself as they developed it. “
It was
a beautiful development. The water was gorgeous up there,” she said later. “It was a fabulous idea.” In theory, perhaps. But the real estate market soon soured. The lots did not sell quickly. Interest rates soared from 8 to 18 percent. The McDougals, as managing partners, and to a lesser extent the Clintons, began making interest payments on the loans from their own money. For Hillary Rodham, there was no quick cash to be made on the White River.

As to the larger question of Rodham's changing attitudes toward the acquisition of wealth during that period, the argument can be made that there was a higher consistency at work: her practical sense of doing what it takes to move toward her ultimate goals. Reasons for her saddling up for Jim Blair's cattle roundup, for instance, were plentiful: Her husband would never be the sort to worry about the family's financial security; she was an intelligent feminist, who saw no reason not to compete in what was largely a man's world, and who viewed financial strength as an important means of gaining power and independence. A higher personal income would make it less risky for Clinton to borrow money for political campaigns in the future. All of these are legitimate explanations, and yet there is evidence that Rodham felt her own zigzag, the internal contradiction, and that she was not entirely comfortable with what she was doing.

Rodham and Clinton took a vacation in England the year when she was playing the market.
One day
they were invited to tea at the home of John and Katherine Gieve. Katherine Gieve, formerly Katherine Vereker, had been a friend of Clinton's during his Oxford days. Two other close friends from that era, Sara Maitland and Mandy Merck, also came to the tea, along with several left-wing members of a women's reading group whose slogan was “Why be a wife?” Clinton, according to Merck, seemed years younger than the heavy-lidded, bearded Rhodes Scholar she had remembered from Oxford: “much thinner, closer shaven, with chestnut hair, a shiny blue blazer—not anything like what he wore at Oxford.” Rodham wore large glasses and kept rather quiet. The subject at the tea was equal pay for women. Clinton jumped right into the conversation, saying how hard it
was to measure value. “How do you compare the value of a truck driver to the value of a beautician?” he asked. The women were impressed by his knowledge and sensitivity on the issue. “Who is that?” one whispered to Merck. “None other than the governor of Arkansas,” she responded.

Finally the conversation moved on to Rodham. What did she think? “You know,” she said, “I'
m beginning
to think there must be more to life than this greasy pole, this rat race.” She was talking about the greasy pole of politics and the rat race over money. And she added: “I'm thinking about getting back into religion.” The other women were stunned. They were utterly political creatures who had no context in which to place her remarks. “If she had said, ‘I think I'm going to be a Moonie,'” Merck said later, “she could not have appalled her audience more.”

C
HELSEA
Victoria Clinton was born on February 27, 1980, seventeen days early. Clinton had been home from a trip to Washington less than fifteen minutes when Hillary went into labor. He had studied the Lamaze method and planned to be in the delivery room, but the birth was difficult and required a Caesarian section. When a nurse finally handed his infant daughter to him, he would not let go of her. “
He walked
all over the area … holding the baby in hi
s a
rms,” a hospital official reported. As he looked at his daughter, he realized that he was experiencing something that his own father had never been able to do. “Well,” Clinton later recalled saying to himself, “here's another milestone he didn't reach.” The date was reminder enough. February 27 was the date that the family honored as the birthday of W.J. Blythe.

Not long after mother and daughter returned home from the hospital, Carolyn Yeldell Staley, Clinton's old high school friend, an opera singer who had moved back to Little Rock with her family to work on the state arts council, wrote a song about Chelsea. She sang it in the Governor's Mansion, accompanying herself on the piano. It was a sentimental ballad written from the perspective of humble parents in awe of their creation. One stanza included the lines, “We may not be worthy, but we'll try to be wise.” After listening to the song, Rodham approached Staley and said rather coldly, “That's a nice song, Carolyn. But who's not worthy? You and your tape recorder?”

THE birth of Chelsea might have been the last good thing to happen to Clinton in 1980. On the American public stage, this was another year of confusion and disillusionment not unlike 1968, except this time along with tragedies and crises there were moments of incompetence and rotten luck
piling up in rapid succession. Jimmy Carter went into that final year of his first term with the lowest ratings of any president in modern times, viewed by the liberal wing of his own party as too moderate and tight-fisted on domestic policy and by the larger public as weak and indecisive in foreign affairs. When he attempted to take strong action to counter the latter image, it seemed to compound the problem. When the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, he imposed a grain embargo on the Soviet Union and ordered a boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow, actions which angered midwestern wheat farmers and demoralized the public. When the Iranians would not respond to diplomatic efforts to free dozens of Americans held hostage in Tehran, he ordered a rescue mission that aborted when a U.S. Navy helicopter crashed in the Iranian desert, killing eight servicemen. One unpredictable event after another left Carter and the nation reeling. There were race riots in Miami. Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington State. More than one hundred thousand Cuban refugees, encouraged to leave by Fidel Castro, landed on the beaches of Florida in what was known as the Mariel boatlift.

The state of Arkansas in 1980 was a microcosm of national unease and disarray. Truckers were striking, Ku Klux Klansmen were on the march, tornadoes ripped through the countryside. The economy was turning downward, forcing state revenues below the overoptimistic estimates and costing public school teachers the raises they expected. Although Clinton's poll ratings remained higher than Carter's that spring, he sensed that he was in trouble. When Frank White, a beefy, jovial savings and loan executive and former economic development official in the Pryor administration, switched parties and announced that he would challenge Clinton as a Republican in the fall election,
Clinton told
Rodham that White would start the race with 45 percent of the vote. The young governor feared that he had already angered at least that many people during his first year in office.

A seconding motion came sooner than expected, in the Democratic primary in late May, when Monroe Schwarzlose, the seventy-seven-year-old turkey farmer, drew 31 percent of the vote. The old farmer's showing was a stunning expression of no confidence in Clinton, since Schwarzlose was the ultimate fringe candidate, who had carried only I percent in the same primary in 1978. It was also a signal to Clinton from the timber industry, which was still raging over the clear-cutting controversy. Schwarzlose fared best in south Arkansas timber counties, where he received behind-the-scenes encouragement from John Ed Anthony.

A few days later, on June 1,
a bad
situation deteriorated. Suddenly, perhaps inevitably, the troubles of Governor Clinton and President Carter converged in northwest Arkansas, when several hundred Cuban refugees who had come to the United States in the Mariel boatlift rioted and broke
out of their resettlement camp at Fort Chaffee. Clinton would be given high marks for his performance under pressure in dealing with the Cuban refugee crisis, but his close friendship with Carter, which became strained in private but did not break in public, was held against him by Arkansas voters. It was also used to great advantage by Republican challenger Frank White and his handlers, who replayed footage of the Fort Chaffee riot to associate Clinton with images of disorder and bad times.

The buildup of tension at Fort Chaffee began in mid-May with the arrival of the first Cubans. Although the sprawling military base had been used as a resettlement center for Vietnamese refugees earlier in the decade with little controversy, nearby residents were alarmed this time by reports that the Cuban contingent included criminals and mental patients. Most of the eighteen thousand refugees sent to Arkansas waited patiently to get processed. But a number of rebellious young men grew more agitated day by day at their confinement. Several hundred of them broke out of the camp on May 26 and created a minor disturbance in a nearby hamlet. Clinton had urged federal officials to tighten security after that to prevent a more serious confrontation with posses of shotgun-toting citizens in towns near the fort. If the federal authorities did not secure the camp within seventy-two hours, Clinton said, he would take action to secure it himself.

Clinton took precautionary steps in that direction. He activated a few dozen National Guardsmen and authorized state police to send troops to the Fort Smith area from all eight sectors of the state. But he was surprised and embarrassed by a second round of disturbances, believing wrongly that the Carter administration by then had resolved a dispute among federal officials over control of the refugees. White House aide Eugene Eidenberg had insisted in conversations with Clinton that the post commander, Brigadier General James (Bulldog) Drummond, had been granted the authority to contain the Cubans inside their relocation camp. Drummond maintained that he had no such authority. On the morning of June 1, after staging a sit-in at the main gate, several hundred Cubans bolted past the military guards, who did nothing to stop them, and marched onto a nearby-highway chanting “
Libertad! Libertad!
” They were met by a state police squad and retreated to the fort. But late that afternoon, they congregated at the main gate again, this time more than a thousand strong, and again met no resistance from the military guards as they ran out the gate and down the highway, carrying sticks and bottles. The state police had formed a protective line at the edge of the town of Barling. When the Cubans reached them, there was a brief confrontation in which sixty-seven people were injured, including several officers, but mostly Cubans, some of whom had their heads cracked open.

Clinton and James H. Jones, the adjutant general of the Arkansas National
Guard, and Jones's chief of staff, James A. Ryan, flew by helicopter from Little Rock to Fort Chaffee soon after they heard about the riot. Their first meeting was with General Drummond. Ryan had never seen the young governor in a tense situation of that sort before and thought “he asked some very intelligent questions, questions that were relevant.” Jack Moseley, editor of the
Southwest Times Record
in Fort Smith, was eavesdropping outside the open door. He heard “a lot of shouting and loud voices” and Drummond saying that it was not the Army's fault because it was restricted by law from intervening. A voice that Moseley identified as Clinton's responded by saying, “Well shit, General, who left the wirecutters in the stockade if none of this was the military's fault?”

After the meeting with Drummond, Clinton activated two National Guard battalions and an infantry company and had them stationed outside the gates. He then had his staff arrange a meeting with community leaders and concerned residents, first in Barling, then in Jenny Lind. The crowds were hostile at first. At Barling, one local official jumped up on his chair and shook his fist at the governor. At Jenny Lind, Clinton hopped up on the back of a pickup truck parked under a shade tree, surrounded by angry local men carrying shotguns. Moseley, who would endorse Frank White later that year in editorials that excoriated Clinton, nonetheless came away from the Fort Chaffee incident impressed by Clinton's behavior under pressure: “I think he showed a tremendous amount of fortitude. He took charge. He accepted responsibility. He behaved in a responsible manner. He listened to what the military commander had to say and went toe to toe with
the White
House.” Eidenberg, the White House official in charge of the refugee situation, arrived at Fort Smith in the middle of the night and was met by Clinton, who “in no uncertain terms” made clear to him that “it was his judgment that the dispute over the law enforcement authority question had made possible an event that did not have to happen.”

Eidenberg agreed. At a press conference held at two-thirty that morning, he pledged that no more Cubans would be sent to Arkansas.

W
ITH
more troops stationed outside the gates and the dispute over military authority resolved, there were no more refugee uprisings that summer. But the Fort Chaffee drama was only at intermission, soon to be resumed, and other troubles kept coming at Clinton nonstop. A sense of imminent disaster permeated the governor's office. If a telephone rang after office hours, aides would joke, “Don'
t answer
it—they'll probably want the National Guard!” The state broiled in a heatwave that took the lives of several older citizens, led to the suffocating deaths of thousands of poultry chicks, and made life generally miserable for an already grousing populace. Even
more troublesome was the car tags issue, which would not go away. Every month, one-twelfth of the car owners in the state erupted in anger as they had their license tags renewed and were required to pay fees that had increased by as much as tenfold. Although the licenses still went for relatively modest sums, the tax became an easy and obvious target of public discontent—all of it directed not at the legislature but at Clinton.

It reached the point where chief of staff Rudy Moore felt that they could not please anybody. He thought of it as a wave of hostility building, month after month. By July, Clinton realized that the wave might drown him. One day, after giving speeches in El Dorado and Texarkana, he returned to the office staggering from the negative reaction he was getting.