First In His Class (88 page)

From that point, Morris said, Clinton reacted “as clearheaded as a quarterback under a rush.” They wrote a response ad overnight and produced it early the following morning. The response noted that Nelson had misappropriated Clinton's state of the state message by lifting the words “raise and spend” from a paragraph that in fact was a criticism of the Reagan administration. To pay for the ads, Clinton took out another personal loan from one of the banks that helped him fund the permanent campaign, the Bank of Perry County, which was owned by Herbie Branscum, a longtime Clinton ally and former chairman of the state Democratic party. Television station managers around the state were called and persuaded to take the response ads immediately and run them Sunday and Monday.
Gloria Cabe
recruited her teenage daughter to serve as the delivery woman. She and a pilot flew around the state in a thunderstorm to get the tapes to the stations. Another team of volunteer drivers carried the audio responses to dozens of radio stations.

Clinton defeated Nelson handily that Tuesday, so easily, in fact, that Cabe wondered whether Morris's final poll could have been accurate. When Morris called her and asked for his payment for the poll, she said she would not give it to him until he provided her with the detailed results. She never got the results, she said later, and she never wrote Morris the check.

O
NE
day in December, in the month after the election, Clinton called Gennifer Flowers, one of the women who had been named in the Nichols lawsuit. Clinton did not know that Flowers was tape-recording their conversation. They talked about the lawsuit and Sheffield Nelson. “
I stuck
it up their ass,” Clinton said. “Nelson called afterwards, you know.” He said that Nelson had claimed that he had nothing to do with the infidelity allegations. “I know he lied. I just wanted to make his asshole pucker,” Clinton said to Flowers. “But I covered you….”

When AP reporter Bill Simmons had first called him and read him the
list, Clinton told Flowers, his response was, “God… I kinda hate to deny that!” He had good taste, Clinton told her. Then he added: “I told you a couple of years ago, one time when I came to see you, that I had retired. And I'm now glad I have because they scoured the waterfront.”

A
S
Ed
Howard was moving
through the crowd at Oaklawn race track in Hot Springs on Derby Day, April 20, 1991, he saw Governor Clinton approaching from the other direction. Howard was a real estate agent in Malvern. He was a Clinton supporter. He had known Clinton since the summer of 1969, when he served as a drill instructor for the ROTC unit at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He was there when Clinton had signed up for the reserve program as a means of avoiding the draft, and he had been there when Clinton's letter to Colonel Holmes arrived from Oxford. Nearly ten years later, when Clinton was in his first campaign for governor, Howard had received a call from a Republican political operative who wanted him to go public with his knowledge of Clinton's actions to avert the draft. Howard had declined. Now another decade had passed, Clinton seemed to be on the verge of running for president, and the questions were coming again. Howard was being pursued by a reporter for the
Arkansas Gazette
who had heard from an ex-student in Fayetteville about the possible existence of a controversial letter from young Bill Clinton concerning the draft. The reporter had called Howard several times. It was the first thing that crossed Howard's mind when he saw Clinton at Derby Day. Maybe, he thought, he should tell the governor.

They shook hands and chatted a minute, and then Howard said that a reporter was on the trail of the letter and the draft.

“Oh, don't worry about that,” said Clinton. “I've put that one to bed.”

“Okay,” said Howard.

There was a pause, and then Clinton asked, “What did you tell 'em?”

“Nothing,” said Howard.

“Good,” Clinton said.

L
ESS
than three weeks later, on the morning of May 6 at a convention hall in Cleveland, Ohio, Clinton walked to the podium to give the keynote address at the national meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The session had generated controversy even before it began, with the decision to exclude Jesse Jackson from the list of speakers. Clinton, as the president of the DLC, had taken the brunt of Jackson's wrath, along with a few sharp criticisms from Ron Brown, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
As Clinton
prepared to speak, he took out a single
piece of paper that had twenty words scratched on it. From those one-word cues he delivered what many in the audience regarded as the finest political speech of the year. “We'
re here
to save the United States of America,” he declared, not just the Democratic party. “Our burden is to give the people a new choice rooted in old values. A new choice that is simple, that offers opportunity, demands responsibility, gives citizens more say, provides them responsive government, all because we recognize that we are community. We're all in this together, and we're going up or down together.” The buzz in Washington among journalists and political opinion makers was that the Cleveland speech had established Clinton as a serious national figure, one who seemed to have a clear idea of what he wanted to do as president.

Two days
later, back in Little Rock, Clinton made an appearance at the Governor's Quality Conference in a ballroom at the Excelsior Hotel. Paula Corbin Jones, then a twenty-four-year-old secretary for the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, which was sponsoring the conference, was working at the reception desk outside the ballroom. According to an account she would give three years later, which Clinton denies, the governor stared at her as he stood nearby, and then later dispatched one of his state troopers to solicit her. Handing her a piece of paper with a room number on it, the trooper, according to her account, said that Clinton wanted to meet her in his room. She said that she went out of curiosity. Inside the room, she said, Clinton kissed her on the neck, placed a hand on her thigh, said that he liked the curves of her body and the flow of her hair, turned “beet red,” and asked her to perform a sex act. She refused, she said, and quickly left.

I
N
June and July, Clinton talked to scores of friends about whether he should run for president. He could present a convincing case either way, as he always could. One of his arguments on the negative side had echoes of 1987. He would say that he was not sure that Chelsea was ready. There was a new problem as well: his promise to the voters of Arkansas that he would serve out his term as governor. Hillary seemed not merely ready this time, but eager, as were most of their friends. On August 14, Hillary Clinton went up to Bentonville for a meeting of the Wal-Mart environmental board, which she chaired. Texas Land Commissioner Garry Mauro, and Roy Spence, head of an Austin advertising firm, were also there.
They had
known Clinton and Rodharn since the McGovern campaign in Texas in 1972. Now Mauro was on the Wal-Mart environmental board with Hillary, and Spence had the company's advertising account. After the meeting, Hillary turned to Spence, who had rented a car, and said, “Let's drive
around.” Spence drove aimlessly. Mauro sat in the back and Hillary in front. “We're thinking about doing it,” Hillary said. “We're thinking about going forward with this great adventure. What do you all think?”

“This is what we've been waiting for, for a long time,” Spence said.

Hillary said there were some problems and she needed their advice. “Bill made a contract with the people of Arkansas to not run and he's really worried about it,” she said.

Spence said it was important to “lance that boil.”

How? asked Hillary.

“Your enemies will hold it against you, but your friends don't have to,” Spence said. “They'll want you to run. Get in the car and drive around Arkansas and seek the counsel of the family members.”

They drove around for another half-hour, and then Spence circled back to the Wal-Mart parking lot and turned off the engine. “You know, Roy, they'll say a lot of things about our marriage,” Hillary said.

“Yeah.”

“What should we do about that?”

“Admit it. Early.”

A few days later, Clinton drove around Arkansas in what was called “The Secret Tour.” In town after town, he told supporters that he felt troubled about breaking his pledge to serve out his term.
Everywhere he
went, people told him to run. He was participating in a well-scripted skit. Not long after he finished, he announced the formation of an exploratory committee, the first formal step on the way toward an announcement. The next three steps were taken in sequence when the Clintons visited Washington in mid-September. First, in a day-long session chaired by Mickey Kantor in a meeting room at the Washington Court Hotel, they met with about twenty political friends and allies and plotted the strategy and mechanics of a campaign: what issues to emphasize, how to put together a staff and raise money.
Kantor gingerly
broached the subject of how Clinton intended to deal with questions about infidelity.

That subject got a more thorough vetting later at a meeting in Frank Greer's office attended by a smaller group that included the Clintons, Bruce Lindsey, Greer, and Stan Greenberg. In dealing with reporters and political operatives all summer,
Greer had
come to realize that Clinton had “an incredible reputation around town” for philandering. The next morning, Clinton was scheduled to meet the elite of Washington's political press corps at a traditional function known as the Sperling Breakfast, founded by Godfrey Sperling, Jr., of the
Christian Science Monitor
. What should he do, if anything, to assure this crowd that his personal life was under control, that he would not implode like Gary Hart? The mention of the subject irked Clinton. The rules had changed since Hart, he said. Now there was
so much hypocrisy involved. If you just go out and divorce your wife, you never have to deal with this. But if you work at your problems, if you make a commitment, then you do. So people are rewarded in politics if they divorce their wives. That was the genesis of the answer they decided Clinton should give at the Sperling Breakfast. He would say that he had had some problems, but that he and Hillary worked things through and they were committed to their marriage.

Clinton and Hillary left for dinner. When Clinton came back a few hours later, he told Greer, “Hell,
I just
had dinner with Vernon Jordan and Jordan said, ‘Screw 'em! Don't tell 'em anything!'”

That probably would not work, Clinton was told.

The next morning, before the breakfast, Greer encouraged several reporters to ask a question about Clinton's sex life. No one seemed eager to do it. Finally, as the session was nearing an end, the question came up. Clinton replied that it was the sort of trivia that people obsessed about while Rome was in decline. But on this occasion, with Hillary at his side, he added: “Like nearly anybody who has been together for twenty years, our relationship has not been perfect or free from difficulties, but we feel good about where we are and we believe in our obligation to each other, and we intend to be together thirty or forty years from now, whether I run for president or not.”

I
N
the early morning of October 3, Clinton, in his jogging shorts and shoes, headed down the mansion driveway and out the gate, heading north through his neighborhood of Victorian homes and across the bridge over 1-630 into the quiet downtown. The streets counted down as he ran, past Tenth and Ninth and Eighth and Seventh and Sixth and Fifth and Fourth and Third and Second, until he arrived at East Markham Street, one block from the Arkansas River. He loped past the Old State House. In a few short hours, at noon, he would stand there, on a platform framed by twelve American flags and four grand white columns, and say the words he could not bring himself to say four years earlier, words that he had wanted to say for so long.

He had been up until at least two-thirty the night before, sitting at his oversized chair
in the
breakfast nook next to the kitchen, making telephone calls, nibbling on a banana with peanut butter spread on it, working through the final drafts of his speech with a team of writers: Bruce Reed from the DLC, pollster Greenberg, consultant Greer, and the author Tommy Caplan, his friend from Georgetown. Now the speech was typed and printed, and Greer had already slipped embargoed copies to the wire services, hoping that he could thereby prevent Clinton from making too
many of his last-minute revisions. Greer and Reed were waiting for him when he returned from his jog. It looked beautiful down there at the Old State House, he told them. With Clinton still sweating in his running clothes, Greer positioned him in front of a portable bar, which they pretended was a podium, and had him rehearse the speech. His allergies were flaring and they worried about his voice. The speech seemed too long; they cut several lines. The last thing Clinton wanted was to remind anyone that he was the guy whose most famous speech prompted members of the audience to chant: “Get the hook!”

At eleven-thirty, everyone was ready to go except Clinton. He was in his room, rummaging through his closet, searching for a tie that looked presidential. He settled on one that was dark blue with diagonal stripes.

It was a glorious high autumn day, clear and golden. The crowd gathering in front of the Old State House was in a festive mood. There were a few thousand people there, legislators, state workers, curious onlookers, staff members, friends.
As Diane
Blair approached the black iron gate leading onto the lawn, she stopped for a moment. There on the sidewalk in front of her stood Orval Faubus, symbol of the Old South, an ancient and lonely man, reduced to a sideshow, hawking one of his books. A television crew swept past, oblivious of the old governor's presence. History rises, Blair thought, and history rejects.