First In His Class (80 page)

Still, Bill Clinton now had a cause, a story, a political identity. From the passage of the reform package in November 1983, in every poll, the people of Arkansas could cite something they liked about him as governor: he was the one who had improved the schools and forced the teachers to prove their competence. He was the education governor.

J
OGGING
was the craze
in Little Rock during that era, and Clinton took up jogging. One day he ran in a four-mile race on a course that weaved its way past the Victorian homes in the historic Quapaw District, around the Arkansas Governor's Mansion, and back down to the Capitol. Jim Blair, his lawyer friend from Fayetteville, was in town and ran the race at the governor's side. As they jogged by the mansion, Clinton decided to take a break. He walked for a few minutes, catching his breath and playing with his dog Zeke. Then he started up again, lumbering down the street to catch Blair. “Let's finish strong!” Clinton huffed as they crossed the highway and neared the Capitol, and suddenly he sprinted past his friend to reach the finish line first. It was a fitting performance for Clinton's second act as governor. Now he was the long-distance runner, plodding along mile after mile for his state. To stifle the inevitable talk that he was looking for a faster track, he said that he hoped and intended to serve as governor for another six to eight years. He was in it for the long haul, the marathon man.

Clinton's Arkansas experience became a testing ground for strategies and policies that might be applied on the national level. Since the morning after he and Jimmy Carter had been defeated in 1980,
Clinton had
focused on what it “would take to recreate a new majority for change in America,” which is to say what it would take for an activist Democrat to make it to the White House. He felt that his party had become stuck in “no-win situations” and become known as “the party of blame.” It got in trouble, he said, when “the need for change conflicted with people's most deeply ingrained habits or most cherished values. If you want to be for change, you have to render that change in ways that people can understand and relate to.”

That did not mean, he said, resorting to the familiar nostrums of the New Deal coalition. Clinton had long since turned away from what he viewed as the politics of nostalgia. Going back even a decade before his defeat to Frank White, back to the Duffey Senate campaign in Connecticut in 1970, he had been searching for new formulas for Democratic success.
By the time his party gathered in August in San Francisco for the 1984 Democratic National Convention, he believed that the great divide that needed to be narrowed was not so much between liberals and conservatives as romantics and realists. Although he had remained neutral in the presidential primary battle that year between former Vice President Walter Mondale and Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, and although he eventually cast his convention vote for Mondale, his intellectual sympathies rested with Hart, his onetime boss in the McGovern campaign, who was basing his challenge on generational change. During an informal gathering at the convention,
Clinton asked
one of his colleagues, Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado, what he thought of the keynote address by Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, a rhetorical masterpiece that had stirred the crowd with its rich evocation of the core Democratic principles of empathy and equality. Lamm said he was impressed and moved, to which Clinton responded, “Come on, what did it really say about the issues we're trying to raise?”

In Clinton's own speech to the convention that week, he cited
Harry Truman
to talk about the future of the party. “Harry Truman would tell us to forget about 1948 and stand for what America needs in 1984,” Clinton said. “That's the way to attract the millions of Americans who feel locked out and won't vote because they think we're irrelevant. That's the way to attract millions more, mostly young and well-educated, who intend to vote against us because they think we have no program for the future. Harry Truman would say: America has a productivity problem. What are we going to do about it? America is getting its brains beaten out in international economic competition. What are we going to do about it? America has millions of people who want to work but whose jobs have been lost because of competition from low wages abroad or the necessity to automate at home. What are we going to do about it? America is mortgaging its future with high deficits, driving interest rates too high, making our dollar too expensive and our trade deficit enormous. What are we going to do about it?… America is pricing itself out of affordable health care. What are we going to do about it? America needs an invigorated education system based on high standards and real accountability, as well as more money. What are we going to do about it?”

In the aftermath of Mondale's defeat, Clinton began to place his programs into a broader philosophy of opportunity and responsibility, which he saw as a theme that could lead to change without alienating the middle class. His education reforms in Arkansas set the model: the opportunity was for teachers to get more pay and more flexibility, the opportunity was for students to get more course offerings and smaller class sizes, and the responsibility was for both teachers and students to document their skills
through standardized competence tests. During the mid-1980s, as he took an increasingly active role in the National Governors Association, he pushed that theme and expanded its scope to include other issues such as welfare, where workfare-style proposals Clinton helped design and push offered opportunity for work, education, and child care, but linked them to the responsibility of welfare recipients to work their way off the rolls and find jobs. In Arkansas, he offered major industries the opportunity to expand through major tax breaks, with the responsibility of staying in the state and expanding their workforces. He was merging ends and means, strategy and philosophy. And as he followed that course, his critics argued that his efforts to develop win-win situations made him so malleable that his word was unreliable. Of his opportunity-responsibility theme, some complained that more of the responsibility seemed to be placed on the less powerful and more of the opportunity seemed to be going to those who already had ample clout and, not incidentally, the wealth that Clinton needed to fund his political rise.

The essential question of his permanent campaign became whether his will to survive would overwhelm his convictions.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
 
RELATIONSHIPS

F
OR MORE THAN
a decade, since his return home from his long odyssey through Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale, Clinton had been preoccupied with the task of becoming. Only rarely was he jolted into periods of introspection during which he would consider why he was what he was. It had happened when his daughter was born, and again when he was defeated for governor. Now that question engulfed him once again.
This time
it began when a young man named Rodney Myers approached Arkansas State Police narcotics investigator Robert Gibbs and Hot Springs detective Travis Bunn in the spring of 1984 and told them that Roger Cassidy Clinton, the governor's younger brother, was a cocaine dealer. The investigators heard Myers's story, which meshed with other information they had been gathering during a state-federal narcotics probe of cocaine use in Arkansas. They took him to see Sergeant Larry Gleghorn, Gibbs's supervisor at the criminal division, who set in motion a sting operation in which they would wire Myers with a hidden tape recorder and place a video camera in his apartment to record Roger Clinton selling cocaine.

The awkwardness in having the Arkansas State Police investigate the brother of the Arkansas governor was compounded by the fact that
both Gibbs
and Gleghorn knew the Clintons personally. Before transferring to the criminal division, they had been assigned to the state police security detail at the executive mansion, serving as bodyguards, chauffeurs, and at times valets for the governor and his family. Gleghorn had been friendly with the extended Clinton clan, including Roger and his mother Virginia, who was now married to her fourth husband, Richard Kelley, a food broker. During Gleghorn's two-year stint at the mansion, Roger had been a frequent visitor and an occasional problem. The governor's younger brother was a good-times fellow, gold-chained and open-collared, and
though he
detested the memory of his father and namesake, who died when he was eleven, he seemed to have taken on a measure of the old man's personality: the gregarious and unreliable “dude,” surviving on guile and charm. He had partied and performed with his rock band at after-hours clubs in Little Rock that stayed open until dawn. More than once, according to Gleghorn, Governor Clinton had asked a member of the security detail “to kind of go and keep an eye on that situation.” Now the eye was a surveillance camera.

One day
soon after the investigation began, a state police official alerted Clinton's law enforcement aide, who told chief of staff Betsey Wright. Wright called the Rose Law Firm in search of Hillary, who had rejoined the firm after her service on the education task force, and found her eating lunch with friends at a restaurant on Kavanaugh Street. Wright and Hillary drove to the mansion and told the governor. According to Clinton's later recollections, he was also informed of the investigation separately by State Police Colonel Tommy Goodwin. It was not, in any case, the most closely held secret. Nor was it normal procedure to advise the brother of a drug suspect that a sting operation was under way. Although Clinton had no authority over the matter,
he wrote
a note to Colonel Goodwin stating that he would not interfere in the investigation and that he expected it to be handled in routine fashion.

Clinton's private reaction to the news was a mixture of guilt and dread. When he and Roger had lived in the same home on Scully Street, and even during the early years at Georgetown, he had included his little brother in many of his activities and had written and talked about him with parental love and concern. But then he “
got so
wrapped up in” his career, Clinton said later, that he paid less attention to his brother. Did the news that Roger was a cocaine dealer take him by surprise? Clinton said later that it did, and that he felt guilty about not being more involved during those years as Roger dropped out of college three times and bounced around with rock bands. But the fact that, even before the drug investigation began,
Clinton occasionally
had asked members of his security detail to watch out for Roger indicates that he had some suspicions. The heads-up from the state police, according to Betsey Wright, was “
not the
first time the possibility of his brother using cocaine had ever crossed his mind, yet it took him by surprise. Suspecting is not mutually exclusive from being taken by surprise. You hope against hope.”

Part of Clinton's dread came from the realization that he had to keep quiet about what he had learned. The painful prospect of allowing his brother to be stung, arrested, and sentenced to prison was balanced against the politically damaging repercussions of interfering in an official investigation. The surveillance dragged on for weeks.
With Officer
Gibbs hiding under a blanket in the back seat of the car, informant Myers drove out to Roger's apartment and emerged with cocaine and a secret tape-recording of the transaction.
Four more
deals were made and recorded, as investigators gathered evidence on Roger and a cocaine scene that involved a
Colombian national supplier operating between Arkansas and New York and a circle of cocaine users in Hot Springs and Little Rock that included wealthy young lawyers and bond brokers. Roger was heard boasting about how untouchable he was, how nobody would mess with the brother of the governor.

During that period,
Clinton talked
to both Roger and his mother several times without mentioning the investigation. Alone with Hillary or Betsey Wright, he would ask, “
Do you
think they are ever going to finish this?” Finally, the investigators confronted Roger and told him they were charging him with distribution of cocaine. According to Gibbs, Roger tried to deny that he had done anything wrong until he was made aware of the recordings and videotapes. Bill Clinton's sadness at the fall of his brother was tempered by relief that the period of uncertainty was over. He held a press conference in Little Rock that afternoon and then drove down to Hot Springs for a family meeting with his mother and Roger.
It was
an emotional scene, as later described by Virginia, who said that Roger had arrived in tears, threatening to kill himself because of the embarrassment and pain he was bringing to his devoted mother and famous brother. “I caused it! I can end it!” he sobbed. The suicide talk enraged Bill, who shouted, “How dare you think that way!”, leaped up from his chair, and started shaking Roger furiously.