First In His Class (86 page)

The Clintons tried to defuse
the situation with humor. “It was the worst hour of my life—no, make that hour and a half,” Clinton told the
Boston Globe
. “Last night was just weird,” Hillary told a forlorn caucus of Arkansas delegates who gathered the next morning at the Embassy Suites for a postmortem. She quoted her husband as telling her, “‘Well, that's the last time I'll nominate anybody for anything!'” She hoped that the speech would soon be forgotten. “Political history remakes itself every twenty-four hours. Every day is an opportunity to make a new speech.” Still, she was fighting for her husband and the future of their political partnership, and she could not entirely control her competitive bent. “If the criticism is that Bill talked too long and was ponderous,” she said, “hey, that's criticism of all the Bill Bradleys and all the Mike Dukakises of the world.” She was still simmering on the plane ride back to Little Rock Friday morning, according to
Gloria Cabe,
who sat next to her. “
We felt
like we had made some small steps toward recovery but were still flabbergasted by the enormity of the event,” Cabe recalled. “And of all things, for people to think he was a bad speaker! You could say a lot of things about him, but that was just not accurate.”

Betsey Wright
had flown back a day earlier, before the convention was over, and she called a staff meeting. Several members of Clinton's staff had watched the speech at the Oyster Bar restaurant in Little Rock and were confused and demoralized when they gathered to hear Wright's account. Wright intended to give a calm assessment of what had happened. But not long after she began her explanation, she started sobbing.

I
F
Clinton intended to finish his political career as the governor of Arkansas, the recovery from the speech could have ended with the adjournment of the convention. But the permanent campaign was a national endeavor now. The vast network of friends that he and Hillary had constructed across the country was seeking reassurance. Judy Trabulsi in Austin, his friend from the McGovern days, was flooded with calls from acquaintances eager to tease her. “
So this
is the guy you say is going to be president? What a joke!” There was more face-saving work to be done. Clinton needed to transform the disaster into an opportunity by doing something creative and dramatic.
Friends in
Hollywood, producers Linda Bloodworth Thomason and Harry Thomason, an Arkansas native whose brother Danny was the Clintons' optometrist, conceived the answer. They arranged for him to appear on
The Tonight Show
, where he nervously played “Summertime” on his saxophone and made self-effacing jokes that inspired Johnny Carson to laugh with him, not at him. More Americans watched that show than had listened to his convention speech.

That summer and fall of 1988 marked the first even-numbered year since 1974 that Clinton was not engaged in his own political race. Including primaries, runoffs, and general elections, he had been involved in fifteen elections in fourteen years—more elections, he stated with probable justification, than any other politician in America during that stretch. But state election laws had been changed before the 1986 elections to make the gubernatorial term four years instead of two. Now Clinton was without a race, and he was restless, bored, and increasingly distraught about the Dukakis campaign.
Gloria Cabe
said there were times when she thought he wanted to enlist as Dukakis's campaign manager. George Bush's campaign team, led by Lee Atwater, was beating Dukakis over the head with a hammer, making him appear soft on crime by exploiting a case where a Massachusetts felon named Willie Horton had killed again after being released on parole. Clinton knew what he would do in that situation. To continue the metaphor which had been his creed since Frank White had pounded him with negative ads in 1980, he would get out a meat cleaver and cut off Bush's hands. Dukakis did not respond adequately. Once during that fall, as
he was
driving from the airport in Fayetteville to give a speech at the University of Arkansas campus, Clinton raged about Dukakis to Woody Bassett. “He was upset that Dukakis had not fought back on Willie Horton,” Bassett later recalled. “He said that he had written a response ad for them, but they had never used it.”

Not long
after Dukakis lost, Bob Reich, in his annual letter in the
American Oxonian
, put into Rhodes classmate Strobe Talbott's mouth the words that both he and Talbott were thinking. “America,” he wrote, “will survive the next four years the same way it survived the last 20 since we set sail for England: waiting for Clinton to become president.”

Clinton was already making plans. Two days after Christmas, nearly a month before Bush would be inaugurated, Clinton met with John Pouland, a Dallas lawyer who had been the southern coordinator for Gary Hart's presidential campaign. Pouland had flown up to Little Rock with Randy White, who now worked as an assistant to Pouland's law partner, Congressman John Bryant. They arrived at the Governor's Mansion just as Clinton was returning from a jog and adjourned to the study, where they sipped coffee and talked presidential politics for two hours. Clinton was full of questions. Should he run for governor again in 1990 if he wanted to run for president two years later, when he would be in the middle of his term? How much money did he have to raise in Arkansas? Could he be the regional candidate? What about another young southern moderate—Tennessee Senator Al Gore?
White left
the meeting thinking that Clinton could hardly wait for 1992.

•  •  •

G
ETTING
from here to there would not be easy. Throughout his political career, Clinton often demonstrated a keen ability to foresee obstacles that he might encounter, though he could not always find the surest way around them. Now he seemed anxious about how he would get through the next few years. As his permanent campaign took on a national focus, it lost energy in Arkansas. And he still had to survive in Arkansas. When he went before the General Assembly on January 9, 1989, for his state of the state address, he spoke as the first Arkansas governor in more than a century to open a regular legislative session without just having been inaugurated. More than two years had passed since his last election, and that gap, he told his aides, could prove troublesome. His last major effort to raise the sales tax to fund education programs, in 1987, had been defeated after a heavy lobbying effort against it by the state's business interests, who opposed the expansion of the tax to cover professional services that had been exempted. This time he had worked with the corporate powers to devise an education agenda and a tax plan that they could support, but the public mood seemed determinedly antitax. George Bush had just won the presidential election lipreading his promise of no new taxes. Without a fresh mandate from the voters, Clinton feared, it would be hard for him to move a recalcitrant legislature.

During the six years of his second act as governor, state aid to education in Arkansas had increased by a greater percentage than in all but six other states. Yet local support of the schools through property taxes had trailed the national average, meaning that Arkansas still lingered in its traditional spot near the bottom in overall education spending. Clinton had built his career on the education issue. He felt there was more to be done. Before the session, during the time when in earlier years he would have been campaigning for reelection, he spent seven months with his staff and a statewide task force preparing a new agenda for expanded preschool, vocational, and higher education programs. But he realized that getting the taxes to pay for it would be harder than ever. “
The Great
Communicator in Washington, who's told us that all taxes are evil, has made it hard for us to do what we need to do here,” Clinton said in his state of the state address. “I have two answers to that: First of all, President Reagan said in 1983 that education was the business of the states and if funding had to be increased, the states should raise the taxes to do it…. And secondly, unlike our friends in Washington, we cannot write a check on an account that is not funded. We either raise and spend or we don't spend.”

That final phrase, taken out of context, would be used against Clinton later, but at the time it was accurate. The 1989 legislature declined to raise taxes; Clinton had no new money to spend on education. His early premonition of trouble had been fulfilled—and more trouble was on the way.

•  •  •

B
ETSEY
Wright had been at Clinton's side for nearly a decade, since his loss to Frank White. Nothing that concerned Bill Clinton was too trivial for
Major Betsey
, as some staff members called her. During his exile, she had sat in his basement and organized his political files, then had followed him to the law firm and took a desk outside his door, in the bullpen with the secretaries. After his restoration, she had followed him back to the Capitol and become his top aide. She was a c hronic chain-smoking overworker, deep-voiced, literate, who reported before dawn and stayed late into the night.
Now she
was exhausted. Her face, said one friend, seemed frozen in a gaunt expression of pain. Year by year, she had become more of a target of criticism from some good ole boys in the Arkansas legislature, who found her too protective and abrasive. Her relationship with Clinton had grown increasingly tumultuous. They yelled and cursed each other like sailors, but now Wright was becoming more emotional. Policy, personality, private life—everything was getting mixed up into one unsettling stew.

After years of legal deliberations, the first death penalty decisions were approaching in Arkansas. Wright opposed capital punishment but knew that Clinton supported it.
They had
argued over the death penalty since she had gone to work for him. She wanted to believe, she said later, that his position was based on conviction, not political pragmatism. On the night that mass murderer Ronald Simmons of Russellville was to have been executed, she persuaded Clinton to cancel an appearance at a social function, which she thought would look inappropriate. At the last hour, the court granted a stay of execution. Wright called the governor to tell him, but could not find him at the mansion. She discovered that
he was
out having dinner with actress Mary Steenburgen, a longtime friend of the Clintons who had grown up in Arkansas.

He was into self-denial again, she told her friends. She concluded that he was going through a severe midlife crisis. She said that he was having a serious affair with another woman, and was not even being discreet about it. Everyone knew, she said. She knew, the troopers knew, Hillary knew. There were great screaming matches at the mansion. Once a counselor was called out to mediate. Clinton was broaching the subject of divorce in conversations with some of his colleagues, governors from other states who had survived the collapse of their marriages. But he told his friends in Arkansas that he wanted to save his marriage. And Hillary wanted to save it, too. She told Wright that she was unwilling to abandon the partnership. She had invested too much in Bill Clinton and was determined to see it through. Wright felt that she had to get away. She was irritable beyond any measure that even she could justify. She was so mad at Clinton that she
told him she felt like boiling a pot of water and pouring it over his head. She was, as she would discover later, suffering from a deep clinical depression. Late in the summer of 1989, she told Clinton that she was burned out. She asked for and got a leave of absence.

In the midst of this personal turmoil, Clinton was losing another father. His minister, W. O. Vaught, was in the final stages of bone cancer.
Nearly every
week Clinton stopped by Vaught's house to check on him. Once he brought along the evangelist Billy Graham. They stood at Vaught's bedside and Graham said a prayer. A few days before Christmas, Clinton was among a group of friends who came over to put up the Vaughts' Christmas tree. When the ailing minister said that he wanted to see it, Clinton picked up the tree and carried it into his room. On Christmas Day, 1989, the old Baptist preacher died. Clinton served as a pallbearer at the funeral, leading the procession down the front steps of Immanuel Baptist Church on the way to Roselawn Memorial Park. At the graveyard, Vaught's son, Carl Vaught, gave a final speech about his father and the irony of his not being there at this time when everyone needed him. His father, he said, “was doubly aware of how important it was to be present at crucial times.” At that moment, he looked across the grave and caught the watery eyes of Bill Clinton. A few days later, he wrote Clinton a note recalling that moment at the graveyard and saying that he knew Clinton was thinking about some of those special occasions. Clinton wrote back and said
he was
surprised that Vaught could read his face so clearly.

There is a temptation to dismiss the pious Clinton as somewhat of a poseur, seeking to cover up less righteous aspects of his life. But he was always a man of contrasts and contradictions. Within hours in one day, he could eat pork ribs and listen to the Delta Blues music at Sim's Bar-B-Que in the lowlands of Little Rock's predominantly black south side; then drive up to the Heights for a round of golf at the Country Club of Little Rock, an elite hideaway with manicured fairways and no black members; then, on the way home, he might pop in his favorite tape of white Pentecostal gospel music from the Alexandria Sanctuary Chorale. Clinton could go from a meeting with deer hunters in Scott County, furious because the state Game and Fish Commission would not let them run their dogs in December, to an education summit in Charlottesville staying up all night crafting an agenda of education goals for the fifty governors and the Bush administration, to a West Coast fundraising dinner at Norman Lear's house where he mixed with the Hollywood glitterati. If Clinton had the ability to move easily through so many different worlds, he could also appear a chameleon, forced to balance one world off against another. Capable as he was of great bursts of energy and concentration, no single world could keep him content for long.