First In His Class (9 page)

Carolyn Yeldell, who watched Billy from the parsonage next door to his Scully Street house, and had a crush on him, thought that he was always finding a new girl through music. “He'd go to band camp in Fayetteville and there'd be this sort of be-still-my-beating-heart if he saw a good-looking clarinetist. Bill always had this sense about him that he collected girls. Like the Ricky Nelson song, he had a girl in every band. He had the eye for girls
everywhere. He had global vision even then.” They had vision for him as well. Yeldell noticed that when her girlfriends visited her, they parked their cars near the hedge that separated her house from Clinton's so that if he looked out his picture window he could see them.

The band culture played to Clinton's personality.
He never
wanted to be alone. He enjoyed working a crowd, whether old friends or new. He made many close friends in high school, but he seemed more comfortable in crowds. It seemed to Carolyn that he would “make crowds happen. He had a psychological drive for it, a need for happy and nonconfrontational associations.” When the action was too slow moving, even if people were around, he might simply tune out. Sometimes when David Leopoulos was over at the house on a rainy day, when they were sitting in the dining room playing a game, he would look over at Clinton and realize that he was somewhere far away. He would talk, Leopoulos later said, and Clinton would not hear a word he said.

G
RADUATION
for the Hot Springs
High class of 1964 was a week-long extravaganza. It began with a commencement sermon by Carolyn Yeldell's father, the Reverend Walter Yeldell, at his Second Baptist Church. His sermon was entitled “Missing One's Destiny.” A “Silver Tea” was held the next day at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Don Dierks, a timber family whose son Joe was elected student council president after Billy Clinton and Phil Jamison could not run. The house was festooned in red and white, from the bunting to the mints. Seniors were escorted inside to a receiving line of parents, class officers, and school officials, and served tea and cake. Mrs. Mackey was there that night, and at one point gathered a group around her, Billy Clinton and Joe Dierks and David Leopoulos and Phil Jamison and Carolyn Yeldell and a few others. The stern and upright principal's face softened as she spoke. “I've never said this to anyone before, but there is something special about the class of ′64,” she said. “This is going to be a very great class. It's going to accomplish a lot.”

The class picnic was held at Lake Hamilton, followed by Senior Assembly Day in the auditorium. Seniors walked around the halls of the old school getting their Old Gold Yearbooks signed for the last time. Clinton was in the book nearly thirty times “Billy, I am honored to have known a gentleman who has courage, ambition and determination,” his guidance coun-selor, Edith Irons, wrote in his book. “God has richly blessed you. I know in a few years I shall ‘read' about you—please don't get too ‘big and busy' to drop by and see your old counselor.” When friends and teachers handed him their yearbooks, he often turned to the page with the picture of him shaking hands with President Kennedy and signed below the photograph.
His longest message, and his most humble, was to the band director, Virgil Spurlin:

Dear Mr. Spurlin,

Ever since before I could play the C scale—I've been overwhelmed in the presence of your huge hulk of manhood. I know of no finer man anywhere, and I've been fortunate enough to meet many. You've had such a great effect on me—I'll never be able to say what I feel … how much I love and respect you and how much I appreciate everything you've done for me. I honestly tried to do a good job for you, I think I almost made it. Now it's time for me to leave and make the best I can of myself, and I know that no matter how I do, I'll be better because of my association with one of the great Christian men that the Lord ever gave life.

God Bless you,

Bill Clinton

The class banquet was held May 28, and the next day, finally, came the seventy-eighth annual commencement at Hot Springs High School. Clinton and several of his friends spent the afternoon climbing magnolia trees near the school to cut blossoms that they scattered around the grass at Rix Field, where the ceremonies would be held that night. The skies turned dark gray and it rained before the eight o'clock exercises began, but the seniors voted to keep the ceremony outside. After the processional, band members tried to keep their instruments dry under the grandstands, where the rainfall was so heavy that a few drums ended up floating in water. In the class of 363, there were 50 honors graduates who wore gold tassels. The caps and gowns were light gray. They entered the stadium from both ends along a fence decorated with red and white satin ribbons. There were three student speakers: Letha Ann Wooldridge, the valedictorian; Ricky Lee Silverman, the salutatorian; and William Jefferson Clinton, whose grades placed him fourth in the class.
He had
the last word: the benediction. Part prayer, it became the first political speech he gave to a sizable audience:

Dear Lord, as we leave this place and this era of our lives, we ask your blessing on us while we stand together for the last time as the Hot Springs High School class of 1964. Our high school days are no more. Now we must prepare to live only by the guide of our own faith and character. We pray to keep a high sense of values while wandering through the complex maze which is our society. Direct us to know and care what is right and wrong, so that we will be victorious in this life and rewarded in
the next. Lord give us the strength to do these things. Leave within us the youthful idealism and moralism which have made our people strong. Sicken us at the sight of apathy, ignorance and rejection so that our generation will remove complacency, poverty and prejudice from the hearts of free men.

And Lord, once more, make us care so that we will never know the misery and muddle of a life without purpose, and so that when we die, others will still have the opportunity to live in a free land. Take our hands, Dear God, and lead us from this place, into the future, into Eternity, and we will be together again. Amen.

At home on Scully Street that weekend, Virginia Clinton wrote a note to her mother. Edith Cassidy was in many ways Billy's first mother, the one who took care of him for two years as a toddler while Virginia, the young widow, was in New Orleans learning her trade. It was Mammaw who first thought Billy was special, who taught him how to read before he turned three. The two women had competed for his love and respect ever since, but now they could share in his growing success. Virginia wrote her mother a letter bursting with pride in the boy they sometimes called “Bubba.”

“Dear Mother,” she wrote “Here are some of the clippings and activities of Bubba lately. I typed out the beautiful prayer that Bill wrote and recited at the place of graduation. His voice was magnificent as it sounded over the microphone in the football stadium. Of course, I was so proud of him I nearly died. He was truly in all his glory that night.”

CHAPTER THREE
 
THE ROAD AHEAD

T
HERE WAS NO
shortage of useful advice offered to freshmen entering Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in the fall of 1964. The head of the orientation committee enlightened the newcomers on the grading quirks of various professors and pointed out the favored pubs in a city where eighteen-year-olds were allowed to drink beer. The Jesuit fathers warned them of curfews and dress codes: in the rooms by eight-thirty, with only a half-hour break for snacks and socializing before lights out at eleven from Sunday through Thursday. Coats and ties required in class and at the dining hall. No females in the dorm. No public displays of affection, known as PDAs. A columnist for the school magazine,
The Courier
, placed those rules in the context of administration hypocrisy: “
Remember, at Georgetown
you will be addressed as ‘Gentlemen' and treated as children.” Another writer offered a sardonic guide to conformist behav-ior: “The basic rule for survival on campus is to be tough, think tough, act tough. Wear tight chinos to prove your masculinity; wear madras shirts and shoes without socks, just like the 50 guys standing outside the 1789 to prove you can look exactly like another 50, or 500, or 5,000 Happy Hoyas.”

Georgetown in that era was divided into two distinct worlds. The college of arts and sciences, known as the Yard, was all-male and 96 percent Catholic, a homogeneous bundling of parochial school boys from the East Coast who were the quintessential Happy Hoyas. The School of Foreign Service was part of what was known as the East Campus (a few blocks east of the Yard), a consortium that also included the School of Business Administration and the Institute of Languages and Linguistics. The East Campus was a diverse melting pot compared with the Yard:
there were
women around, first of all, most of them in languages, but 148 in foreign service and a handful in business. The East Campus also enrolled scores of wealthy foreign students: the sons and daughters of ruling elites, including a band of polo-playing Cuban exiles who wore their coats like capes, inhaled nonfilter cigarettes, cruised the Hilltop in their convertible sports cars, and got most of the glamorous girls. The School of Foreign Service was the least Catholic part of Georgetown, almost evenly divided between parochial and public school graduates and including a few hundred Protestants and forty-one Jewish students.

Bill Clinton matched none of the Hoya profiles when he arrived at the East Campus for freshman orientation. Going sockless was a bit advanced for someone just making the transition from white socks to dark ones. He might decide to follow the crowds to the campus pubs, but once inside he would guzzle soft drinks or water, not beer: his family turmoil scared him away from alcohol, which he considered a dangerous indulgence. As diverse as the School of Foreign Service was compared to the rest of the university, a drawling Arkansan apparently was enough of an oddity that when Clinton stopped by the administration office on the first day,
the freshman
dean mused aloud whether Georgetown had made a mistake admitting a Southern Baptist whose only foreign language was Latin. Clinton knew it was no mistake: Georgetown was the only school he had applied to during his senior year in Hot Springs, after hearing about it from his guidance counselor, Edith Irons. He wanted to be in Washington, near the center of politics. As he walked out of the admissions office with his mother, he assured her that the dean's sarcasm would soon be overtaken. “Don't worry, Mother,” he told her. “By the time I leave here they'll know why they let me in.”

Clinton'
s roommate
reached Room 225 Loyola Hall while Bill and his mother were out. Tom Campbell was more nearly the Hoya prototype, an Irish Catholic boy from Long Island who had attended a Jesuit military high school. He had driven to Washington with his father, a conservative judge, and when he got to the dorm and saw his roommate's name, he worried about how his old man would react to his sharing a room with a black classmate. Campbell, who had never associated with black people or Southern Baptists, assumed that his roommate was black because of the name: William Jefferson Clinton. His father was helping him unpack when Bill and Virginia returned and overwhelmed the Long Islanders with southern charm. The moment they walked through the doorway, they immediately made the place theirs. As a pair, Campbell said later, “they just filled the room.”

Loyola Hall had once been a hospital wing, an aging brick building with a scattered assortment of single, double, and even four-bedded rooms that were assigned in alphabetical order. Most boys on the second floor had last names beginning with C, a few with B or D. John Dagnon of New
Castle, Pennsylvania, had the biggest room across the hall from Clinton and Campbell, and he hosted a corridor meeting on that first night.
There was
inevitable posturing and politicking as the freshmen went through the ritual of establishing a pecking order. At the start of the evening, the group seemed to revolve around Dagnon and an urbane, witty midwesterner who let it be known that he was heir to a life insurance fortune. But it did not take long for Clinton to become a dominant force, sticking out his over-sized right hand, asking his classmates where they were from, what they were interested in, then working the conversation around to his roots, the giant watermelons grown in Hope, Arkansas, and inquiring, gently, as to whether they had given thought to running for any student office.