First In His Class (8 page)

Jamison and Clinton argued vehemently with the principal. They said her plan was unfair, arguing in the abstract so that it would not look as if they only cared about themselves. They respected and feared Mrs. Mackey;
she was like a God to the students. Yet now, as they made their points, she started crying. Jamison realized that “she was crying because she believed in the principle of what she had decided to do and was not directing it against us. She thought Bill was the greatest. It hurt her to know we were taking it personally.”

Mrs. Mackey did not back down. The only office Clinton could hold without going over the point barrier was class secretary, a position that usually went to a girl. He ran for it, challenging Carolyn Yeldell, who was not only his neighbor but a close friend. They ended up in a runoff, standing out in the hallway together as their classmates cast ballots in the auditorium. Billy had a sense that he would lose: Carolyn was his equal as a student leader, a Baptist minister's daughter who had courted friendships and club memberships with as much intensity as Clinton during their high school years. Whatever he could do, she could do as well, if not better. If he made Boys State, she made Girls State. If he went to Boys Nation in Washington, she went to Girls Nation. If he won a medal for sight-reading on tenor saxophone, she won a medal for singing or piano performance. As they lingered in the hallway, he turned to her. “Carolyn,” he said, “so help me, if you beat me for this, I'll never forget it.” She won.

Even without elected office, Clinton was the school's golden boy. Mrs. Mackey would let him out of class to speak to the Optimists or Elks or the Heart Association about his experiences in Washington at Boys Nation and the desire he felt to do something for his country. The speaking engagements grew so frequent that Mrs. Mackey turned down some requests, fearful that his grades might suffer. Such fears were probably unnecessary. Clinton excelled in class without appearing to study much. David Leo-poulos, who struggled through school, later could not remember Clinton studying in all the time they spent together. Paul Root, who taught world history, recalled that Clinton seemed more at ease than other students.
When Root
assigned outside readings, Clinton chose George Orwell's
Ani-mal Farm
, an allegorical study of totalitarianism. It seemed to Root that Clinton's interest had nothing to do with what grade he might get for the report. He was totally absorbed in the theme within the book: power, how one gains and holds power. “Bill loved to argue, to debate, but he never appeared worried about the subject matter. He just played with it.”

That is not to say that Bill Clinton was noncompetitive. He always wanted to win.
During his
sophomore year when the students from different junior highs joined together for the first day of intermediate Latin, their teacher, Elizabeth Buck, asked them to translate a speech of Julius Caesar's. Clinton zipped through three-quarters of the material, far more than anyone before him, and sat back proudly at his desk. Then along came Phil Jamison, who at a different junior high had had a more demanding Latin teacher. Jamison recited the entire text fluently. Although Clinton graciously
congratulated Jamison at the time, he brought it up for weeks thereafter, and Jamison could tell that behind the smiles his friend was upset.

Hot Springs High was the coveted public school among the seven whites-only secondary schools in Garland County, the local equivalent of a top private institution: rich and academically driven, with a
cadre of
teachers who had devoted their lives to the school. Mrs. Buck, who taught Latin for four decades, was exacting and inspirational. When students entered her classroom, they first contemplated her Thought for the Day, taken from classical texts. Her favorite was from
Hamlet
, Polonius's advice to his son Laertes. She would write it in chalk in her perfect blackboard style: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

The students enjoyed the way she brought a dead language to life, dressing them in togas as they performed plays and readings from ancient Rome. One day they were reading from Cicero and Mrs. Buck decided that they should put Cicero's arch enemy, Catiline, on trial. Catiline was the Huey Long of the first century B.C., covering his reckless ambition in the rhetoric of populism, inciting the oppressed masses in his plots for power, which included plans to kill Cicero and take over the imperial city. As Mrs. Buck was about to assign roles, she later recalled, “Billy Clinton raised his hand and said, ‘Let me be the lawyer,' defending Catiline.”

“I said, ‘Don't you know you have a lost case before you start?ߣ”

“And he said, ‘I really want to try it.' And so he did.”

He put up a vigorous defense and became enraptured with the court-room, where he had a captive audience susceptible to his powers of per-suasion, a focus group for his budding rhetorical and political skills. Defending Catiline, he told Mrs. Buck, made him realize that someday he would study law.

On the other end of the spectrum was the senior physics class, taught by a well-meaning man who came straight from the hills. Billy and his friends took advantage of Thural Youngblood from the first day of class, when they decided that he was not their intellectual equal. They spent much of the class talking to each other in a juvenile code language: “E-Ga” meant a girl had a “good bod.” Youngblood tried to discipline the students—Carolyn Yeldell could mimic him chewing out Clinton: “Ah, hey, yum, Bale Clane-ton, you don't get set down. I'm gun lower your grade from an F to a G, huh.” But physics was a free-for-all. One day Clinton, Jamison, and Ronnie Cecil escorted their teacher to the equipment closet in the back of the room and locked him inside. He banged and pleaded to be let out, but they pretended that the lock was stuck, and studied other subjects and talked among themselves until the bell rang.

The calculus teacher, Mr. Cole, was a serious man who was also the
assistant principal. His advanced class had only eight students, and was held in an annex a block down the street from the red brick high school. Clinton and Jamison were there on the afternoon of November 22 that fall when the telephone rang. Cole walked to the back of the room to answer it, listened but said nothing, then walked back to his desk and put his head down. He sat there, stunned, until finally he looked up and said, “The president has been shot in Dallas.”

Moments later the phone rang again, and the teacher walked slowly back to answer it, and was informed that Kennedy was dead. Clinton would never forget the look on his teacher's face when he returned that second time. “He was totally ashen-faced. I had never seen such a desolate look on a man's face.” Jamison looked over at his friend, the budding politician who only four months before had enjoyed the thrill of his life when he shook Kennedy's hand in the Rose Garden. “He was motionless. Not even a twitch on his face. Yet you could feel the anger building up inside him.”

In the weeks after the assassination, Bill Clinton was in great demand at the club luncheons around town.
His speech
to the Civitan Club on December 3 focused on his memories as one of the last people in Hot Springs to see JFK alive. The handshake on that July morning in 1963 had begun its transformation—from personal exploit to community myth.

W
ITH
his real father long dead, his stepfather diminished, his political hero slain, Clinton was eager for a father figure.
Band teacher
Virgil Spurlin came closest to filling that role. Spurlin was a big, warm-hearted man, an ex-Marine and Baptist deacon who created an extended family out of his group of musical disciples. The band room was on the side of the field house behind the school, and many students treated it as their separate world, hanging out there before and after school and between classes. John Hilliard, one of Clinton's schoolmates, who played the trumpet and later became a composer, thought of the band room as “almost like a hideaway. It was even kind of underground. It was the home spot for all of us. It had a warm atmosphere. We'd leave the band room to venture out.”

The culture in most American towns revolved around high school athlet-ics. In Hot Springs, music competed with sports for top billing. The Trojan football team was often hapless—at pep rallies, students mockingly practiced their most common cheer, “Block that kick!”—but the band and chorus brought home medals every year. The chorus was a massive Wagnerian throng of more than four hundred. And band was something that Hot Springs children prepared for from an early age. A special band teacher worked in all eight elementary schools, roaming from school to school during the week and bringing the citywide group of elementary
school musicians together every Saturday. They played in the Christmas parade each winter and in the Miss Arkansas pageant parade held in Hot Springs each summer, one of the town's favorite events where beauty contestants glided through the shaded streets in convertibles donated by Clinton Buick.

Clinton took up the tenor saxophone. He practiced every night, using it to fill up the lonely, uncertain hours of childhood. He had always hated to be alone, and playing the sax was one of the few ways he could tolerate it. Within a troubled home, Clinton once said, the saxophone gave him “
the opportunity
to create something that was beautiful, something that I could channel my sensitivity, my feelings into.” And it taught him that it took work and discipline to turn his jumble of feelings into notes that were clear and melodic. Every summer he went up to band camp in Fayetteville. By the time he arrived in high school, he was the best saxophone player in the city and soon would compete as the best in the state. Often at night he would go next door to Carolyn Yeldell's to rehearse for contests: she would accompany him on piano.
He toted
his saxophone around as a prized possession. For Christmas during his junior year, his mother bought him a new case, but on the first day back at school Carolyn dropped it as she was getting out of his car, bending the handle in a way that could not be fixed. Clinton yelled at her with an intensity that made her realize how important that instrument was to him.

At Hot Springs High,
Virgil Spurlin
saw in young Clinton something more valuable than a proficient sight reader and deft improviser; he saw a natural leader who could help him keep the group in order during the year and serve as a lieutenant when Hot Springs hosted the statewide band festival each spring. There were three top student positions in the band: student director, drum major, and band major. The band major was the teacher's administrative assistant. It was the perfect assignment for a young politician. The logistics that went into the state band festival were as intricate as plotting out a season's schedule for major league baseball, a mathematical equation that required patience and precision. Thousands of students representing 140 bands around the state would descend on Hot Springs for three days in April. All played in a wide variety of judged venues—solos, accompanied solos, ensembles, sight-reading, marching bands, orchestras. Spurlin, the band director at the host high school, was responsible for putting it all together: hiring scores of judges from out of state and finding rooms for them at the Arlington Hotel, renting forty pianos, and arranging the thousands of performances.

After the schools sent in lists of their performers, Spurlin would take out three-foot poster boards, staple several together, and tack them to a wall. Then he and Bill Clinton would start drawing grids and filling in the names,
places, and judges. They would start with one school and carry it all the way across the board, from marching band to solos, then move on to the next. The schedule called for ten performances an hour, one every six minutes. Each band director was given a pocket-sized timetable, a miniature version of the poster board schedule, and was held responsible for making sure his students were at the right place at the right time, not an easy task, since competitions were staged not only at Hot Springs High but also at music stores downtown and at private studios. While competing in the festival themselves, Clinton and his classmates recorded the results on a huge board in the band room and served as escorts and runners.

In a cosmopolitan resort town with big bands featured in all the top hotels and nightclubs, it was no embarrassment to play tenor sax for the award-winning high school dance band, the Stardusters; or to lead the Pep Band with its white overall uniforms during basketball season, pounding out the driving, sexy theme to “Peter Gunn” or to form a jazz trio known as the Kingsmen and play Dave Brubeck riffs in the auditorium during the lunch hour, wearing dark shades so that the other kids called you the Three Blind Mice. Billy Clinton did those things, and while he was not as smooth and popular in the highest circles as Jim French, the football quarterback, he had a sexual aura of his own. One family picture of him that year captures his playful persona: Billy in his living room, bedecked in his band major coat weighted with medals, but below that wearing shorts, white socks, and black low-top tennis shoes, holding a putter and crouched over a golf ball on the rug.

Although the teachers looked upon him as a model youth, Billy Clinton and his compatriots in the band were
more like
fraternity brothers who knew how to impress elders with their manners and then have a good time out of view. John Milliard, the trumpeter, a year behind Clinton, roomed with Clinton and four other seniors on his first overnight trip to Blytheville. Hilliard, who thought of himself as a “goody two-shoes,” stayed in the motel room while Clinton and his pals were out past midnight and came back in a rowdy mood. On another trip when the band was at a festival at Robinson Auditorium in Little Rock, Clinton was leading a gang of boys up the stairs when they encountered some girls going down. He pulled out his hotel room key and said, “Here it is, girls! Room 157. See you later!”