First In His Class (73 page)

“Rudy, they'
re killing
me out there!” he said to Moore. “They hate my guts!”

“What are you talking about?” Moore asked.

“The car tags,” said Clinton. “A man came up to me and said, ‘I'm havin' a hard enough time makin' a livin', and you're kickin' me while I'm down.' They're killing me out there, Rudy.”

On August 1, Clinton came to believe that his own president was among those killing him. Word came from the White House that all Cuban refugees still being housed at resettlement camps in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida would be transferred to a single consolidated camp at Fort Chaffee. Only two months earlier, Gene Eidenberg had visited Fort Chaffee and promised that no more Cubans would be sent there. Now, the White House officials had changed their minds. Travel aide Randy
White was
in the room at the Governor's Mansion when Clinton got the news and remembers that his boss pounded his desk and launched into an obscenity-laced protest that, considering the circumstances, amounted to a rather normal reaction.

“You're fucking me!” White heard Clinton shout into the phone at a White House official. “How could you do this to me? I busted my ass for Carter. You guys are gonna get me beat. I've done everything I could for you guys. This is ridiculous! Carter's too chickenshit about it to tell me directly!”

Clinton nonetheless
promised to keep the story quiet over the weekend until Eidenberg could travel to Arkansas to explain the situation directly to people in the communities near Fort Chaffee. Word leaked out later that day from Senator Pryor's office. When the press asked Clinton if he could confirm Pryor's claim, he acknowledged that he had known about the White House decision. He had agreed to Eidenberg's request to keep quiet, he said, because he hoped to spend the weekend persuading administration officials to change their minds. The decision, Clinton told reporters, was the most politically damaging one Carter could make. Placing the final
resettlement camp in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Florida would have been smarter, he argued, because Carter had a better chance of carrying Arkansas in the fall election than any of those states. Now, he shared Pryor's assessment that Carter's chances in Arkansas were shot.

What more could Clinton do besides cuss out the White House in private and bemoan the political consequences in public? Many of his aides thought that he should “
kick and
fuss and holler and just tell Jimmy Carter no,” in Rudy Moore's words. Clinton was not prepared to go that far. One reason was historical and emotional: he saw too many modern-day parallels to what he considered to be Arkansas' day of infamy in 1957, when Governor Faubus evoked states' rights to defy federal authorities seeking to desegregate Little Rock Central High School. If the people of Arkansas wanted a provincial demagogue, they would have to look elsewhere. There were many things Clinton would do to try to win an election, but that was not one of them.

There was, to be sure, a broader political consideration as well. As unpopular as Carter might be in Arkansas, he was still president; he was still heavily favored to prevail over challenger Edward Kennedy and win renomination at the Democratic National Convention to be held in New York less than two weeks later. Clinton had signed up as a floor whip for Carter at the convention. He had been chosen to give a primetime convention speech as the spokesman for the Democratic governors, after being among those considered for an even more coveted assignment as the keynote speaker. He had strong connections to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, John C. White, the former Texas agriculture commissioner who had been one of Clinton's patrons since the 1972 McGovern campaign. He was still enjoying insider status as Carter's man in Arkansas, sought out for patronage decisions, consulted on domestic programs, invited to briefings on foreign affairs. A too-public break with Carter now might jeopardize what remained of their special relationship.

That weekend Clinton traveled to Denver for the annual meeting of the National Governors Association, where most of the talk among the twenty-four Democratic governors in attendance was about maneuvering between Carter and Kennedy on convention rules and the party platform. Suppressing his sense of betrayal, Clinton worked to shore up support for the president among the other governors.
On the
afternoon of August 4, he talked on the telephone with Carter, who was at the White House. Gene Eidenberg, who was also at the governors' conference, monitored the conversation. Clinton tried but failed to talk the president out of the Fort Chaffee decision, instead only gaining a promise that the state would play a central role in the development of a new security policy at the refugee camp. Although most people viewed the decision through a political lens,
Carter insisted that politics had nothing to do with it. Fort Chaffee was chosen on its merits, as a warm-weather site that had the most suitable facilities. At a meeting at Fort Chaffee the next day, Eidenberg officially announced the consolidation plan and tried to explain that his earlier pledge not to send any more Cubans to Arkansas was rendered “inoperative” by circumstances which could not have been foreseen. “
I understand
,” Eidenberg said, “why that statement made then and the decision made now, being announced now, is being viewed, let's be frank with each other, as a lie, as a breaking of my word, and worse, a breaking of the word of the President of the United States.”

C
LINTON
and Rodham had friends on both sides of the Carter and Kennedy fight. Some called it a struggle for the soul of the Democratic party, but it was fought as much out of weariness and confusion as out of passion. Kennedy supporters thought Carter was foundering because he had turned away from fundamental liberal doctrine and had gotten lost in compromise and vacillation. Carterites believed that Kennedy was waging a futile symbolic struggle for a governing philosophy from which the American public had long since turned away.

Although Rodham was considered the more liberal member of the partnership, she had no trouble choosing sides in this dispute. On a trip to San Francisco, she stayed at the home of Fred Altshuler, her friend from the House impeachment inquiry staff, who held a dinner party in her honor. The Kennedy versus Carter battle dominated the conversation. Altshuler was highly critical of Carter and made an impassioned case for Kennedy.
Rodham derided
him, defending, it seemed, not only the president but her husband by inference. “She said she was talking about practical politics and I was talking about impractical politics,” Altshuler recalled. “She was saying, ‘You have to look at who can get elected and what he can accomplish.' She was definitely in a minority. There were not any other Carter supporters at the dinner. But she held her position.”

Clinton's friends in the Kennedy camp had no better luck. Carl Wagner, a Kennedy aide who had worked with Clinton at Project Pursestrings and served as George McGovern's coordinator in Michigan when Clinton was in Texas, talked with Clinton often that summer. He found Clinton's support of Carter unshakable, even after the Cuban refugee fiasco.
Wagner understood
. All his friends were seeing their way through that race on their own terms. As a southern governor seeking reelection, an association with Teddy Kennedy would have done Clinton no good.

Clinton was now more than a decade removed from his Oxford days as an antiwar protester, eight years beyond the McGovern struggle, six years
past the Watergate scandal. It all seemed so long ago. Mandy Merck, the radical lesbian who had befriended Clinton at Oxford, realized what a different world he was now moving in when she looked him up at the Democratic National Convention in New York.
Merck was
covering the convention for
Time Out
, a counterculture magazine in London. She had no credentials, only a note on Clinton's official stationery inviting her to a reception for the Arkansas delegation. All of the stereotypes that Merck had carried about Clinton's Arkansas, impressions that he had fostered with his stories of old farmers and huge watermelons, were smashed when she walked into the reception room. Here was a congregation of yuppies: lots of dark suits, a smattering of jewel-studded denim jeans, the aura of money and power and sex in the air. Clinton looked like a well-groomed young banker. He greeted her warmly, and started to introduce her around the room. In his thickest Arkansas accent, his eyebrows raised in his classic can-you-believe-this? style, he would say, “I want you to meet a real Marxist-feminist from London, England.”

Two days later, Merck met Clinton in his hotel room for an interview. She told him she was surprised to learn that he was working as a floor whip for Carter opposing a platform plank on federally funded abortions. If women were seeking abortions as a matter of choice rather than health, Clinton told her, then he thought they should pay rather than the taxpayers. Merck was tempted to argue with him, but decided, “What's the point? I'm not going to change his mind.”
Clinton changed
the subject to his convention speech. He hoped it would be in prime time.

Hours before delivering the speech, Clinton received a telegram from Carolyn Yeldell Staley. “
Energize us
,” she wrote. “Renew our flickering faith that leadership does care, and that government can respond. America waits.” Whether Clinton energized his audience that night is open to debate. But it is fair to say that his speech, which he wrote himself, was the shortest, clearest address that he would ever give at a Democratic convention—a cogent analysis of the troubled, transitional period that the Democratic party was enduring.

Simply putting
together the old elements of the Democratic coalition and repudiating Ronald Reagan was not enough anymore, Clinton said. The Democrats had to start looking for “more creative and realistic” solutions to the nation's problems. “We were brought up to believe, uncritically, without thinking about it, that our system broke down in the Great Depression, was reconstructed by Franklin Roosevelt through the New Deal and World War II, and would never break again. And that all we had to do was try to reach out and extend the benefits of America to those who had been dispossessed: minorities and women, the elderly, the handicapped and children in need. But the hard truth is that for ten long years
through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, this economic system has been breaking down. We have seen high inflation, high unemployment, large government deficits, the loss of our competitive edge. In response to these developments, a dangerous and growing number of people are simply opting out of our system. Another dangerous and growing number are opting for special interest and single interest group politics, which threatens to take every last drop of blood out of our political system.”

G
OVERNOR
Clinton was a creature of habit. When someone went in to brief him on a subject or upcoming event, his habit was to keep doing some other activity, either reading or writing, at the same time that he was being briefed. Every half-minute or so, without looking at the aide, he would blurt out, “
What else”
—not as a question but as a sign that he had catalogued the information and it was time to move on. They were two of Clinton's most frequently uttered words: What else. What else. What else. He was always working the telephone in search of inside information: much like his friend Jim Blair, who sought constant reports on cattle futures, only Clinton wanted the latest reading on Clinton political futures, up or down. He would end many conversations with another of his favorite phrases: “Keep your ear to the ground.” He was a young man of oversized appetites. Any aide who spent time with him could tell stories of his inhaling apples in a few massive bites, swallowing them core and all. Hot dogs went down so fast that they barely touched his teeth. The mansion cook could not bake chocolate chip cookies fast enough. Plates of enchiladas and nachos disappeared in seconds. What else. What else. What else.

He was competitive, always looking for a challenge. He put a pinball machine in the game room in the basement of the red brick Governor's Mansion. One day seven-year-old Matt Moore, Rudy's son, stood on a box to reach the levers and rang up a score of 800,000 points, lighting up the whole machine. The governor could not believe it.
A child
had broken his record. When everyone had left for the night, Clinton stayed up, Billy the pinball wizard, shooting, pounding, leaning, tilting, until two in the morning, determined to reclaim the record. What else. What else. What else.

For all of the frustrations that came with being around Bill Clinton, most of the people who fell into his orbit found it exhilarating. Life around him, they said, seemed more vital, closer to the edge, less routine, more physically and intellectually challenging. But in the final months of the 1980 election, Clinton's “what else” personality took a dangerous turn. It started to seem less a product of boundless energy and more a reflection of self-absorption.
To Moore,
he seemed distracted, unable to focus as he should,
unwilling to make clear decisions. People would approach travel aide Randy White and ask what was the matter with the governor: “They'd tell me when they would meet him or shake his hand, it seemed that he was looking at the next person in the room, the next person to talk to. I had a lot of friends comment that he really wasn't listening to them.” Moore thought it might be a midlife crisis, a private conflict between Clinton and Rodham, something involving Clinton and the other women who hovered nearby wherever he went.

Clinton's behavior was a symptom of something larger. He was fighting his own emotions related to ambition and expectations. For most of his life, people had been talking about how he would be president someday. Those great expectations had both carried him along and circumscribed his path. He often seemed to be doing things because they were what someone who might be president should do. Or, occasionally, in rebellion, because they were precisely what a future president should not do. In either case, it was reactive. And when the public started to turn against him, it left him at a loss.