First In His Class: A Biography Of Bill Clinton Read online

  The eighteenth annual American Legion Boys Nation was meticulously regulated. Reveille at seven each morning, lights out at ten at night. The boys marched in straight lines to the dining hall and waited in lines for the buses that carried them down to the federal district each day. They were organized into four sections—Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and Madison—each section with its own counselors and living quarters. The two senators from each state shared a dormitory room, but they were placed arbitrarily in separate political parties, one a Federalist, one a Nationalist. Clinton was assigned to Adams Section, Nationalist party. The official politicking began Sunday night, after a day trip to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at National Cemetery, when the Nationalists and Federalists convened to draft their party platforms and the senators began considering their two major bills for the week, one that called for the creation of a department of Housing and Urban Affairs and included a public accommodations civil rights measure, and another that would institute federal funding of campaigns. There was little dispute about foreign policy. Southeast Asia, a growing trouble spot for the Kennedy administration, was not yet the preoccupation that it would soon become for these boys. The looming danger, the Federalists declared, was “the Communistic threat.” Clinton’s Nationalist party agreed, adding that the Communists must be stopped wherever they attempt to impose their will through force because “appeasement leads to aggression.”

  The most contentious issue was civil rights. Voices rose as both parties debated planks in their platforms and the full Boys Nation senate deliberated over S-1. The argument was played out during one of the pivotal years in the American civil rights saga. Months earlier, Governor George Corley Wallace of Alabama, who had taken office promising “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” stood in front of the school-house door as federal marshals enrolled the first black students at the University of Alabama. And one month after the boys left Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., would stand before a massive throng at the Lincoln Memorial and deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech.

  Race was still largely viewed as a North-South issue, but the lines were not so clear at Boys Nation. Three of the leading civil rights proponents were southern youths—the two boys from Louisiana, Fred Kammer of New Orleans and Alston Johnson of Shreveport, and Bill Clinton of Arkansas—all of whom were questioning their southern heritage of racial separation and inequality. Clinton could not be called a civil rights activist. He had not publicly protested the patterns of racism he grew up with in Hot Springs, where the schools, swimming pools, clubs, and motels had been segregated, where “Dixie” was the high school fight song until his junior year, and where the local Lions club recruited members of the high school choir to appear in blackface for the annual minstrel show. But long before Clinton reached Washington that summer he had rejected the legacy of racism. His mother would later remember how frustrated he seemed as a boy of eleven watching Governor Faubus defy federal orders during the integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957.

  Most of the boys were not that far along. Orson L. (Pete) Johnson of Alabama came to Washington determined to push through a resolution heralding the constitutional primacy of states’ rights, the rhetorical banner behind which southern states protected their segregated policies. It passed 48 to 46. Johnson and his Boys Nation sidekick, Tommy Lawhorne of Georgia, tried to mold the southern senators into a voting bloc. One morning at breakfast they confronted Clinton. Johnson thought he had Clinton cornered. He told the Arkansan that he “didn’t need to be voting for these civil rights resolutions.” The argument got emotional, but Clinton would not budge.

  With both parties divided on the issue, civil rights advocates came out of the Boys Nation session with a modest victory. The bill establishing the urban affairs department and a public accommodations law was defeated. Both party platforms declared that education, not government enforcement, offered the surest means of eliminating racism. The Federalists, dominated by a group of northern conservatives who held segregation and government activism in equal disfavor, stated: “Ideals cannot be forced upon a person by sheer physical force. The thought of this turns many against such an ideal; prejudice and hate must be removed from the hearts and minds of people where it really exists.” Clinton’s Nationalists took a slightly more determined position. “Racial discrimination is a cancerous disease and must be eliminated,” they declared. “But legislation alone cannot change the minds and hearts of men. Education is the primary tool which we must employ … it must begin in the home, in the church and in the schools.”

  On Monday morning, the boys ventured to Capitol Hill to visit the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. Many of them were invited to lunch with the U.S. senators from their state. The Senate Dining Room was quite a sight: hordes of boys in white knit shirts hobnobbing with white men in summer suits. The Arkansas luncheon quartet consisted of Bill Clinton and Larry Taunton at the sides of Democratic senators John L. McClellan and J. William Fulbright. Taunton, with his mellifluous radio voice and self-assured style, had considered himself his roommate’s equal until that day. His mind swirled with possible questions to ask the older men. They seemed so wise and dignified. What could he say? He knew that Senator Fulbright was intensely interested in U.S. foreign policy. Taunton combed through his mind for some interesting way to catch Fulbright’s attention, but could not draw the senator from his conversation with Clinton. He noticed an “instant affinity between Senator Fulbright and Bill,” who seemed “so at ease with the situation.” Clinton had already studied Fulbright’s life and career, and considered the intellectual Arkansan his first political role model. That day, Clinton would say later, he thought he was “the cat’s meow. Fulbright I admired no end…. He had a real impact on my wanting to be a citizen of the world.”

  First, though, Clinton wanted to be vice president of Boys Nation. He offered himself as a candidate that night at the Nationalist Party Convention with an odd boast, noting that he came from Arkansas, the state with the governor who now had the longest continuous string in office in the country. There he was showcasing Orval Faubus, the very symbol of old-school Arkansas racial politics that he disdained. By Clinton’s normal standards, everything about his vice-presidential campaign was a bit halfhearted. It was a race that he would refrain from mentioning later in life. John E. Mills of New York was the Nationalist Party recording secretary, who kept unofficial voting records. They show that Clinton was among seven candidates for the vice-presidential nomination at the start of the evening. He drew six votes on the first ballot, fourth highest. Jack Hanks, Jr., of Texas led the field with eleven. On the second ballot Clinton had fallen to fifth place. He worked the convention hall and picked up another vote on the third ballot, but that was all he could muster. He withdrew after the fourth ballot, throwing his votes to Hanks, who won the nomination and ultimately the vice-presidency.

  Over at the Federalist Convention, Fred Kammer squirmed in his seat as his party nominated Richard Stratton, a conservative delegate from Illinois, a boy who seemed to be popping up every few minutes to utter another quote from his favorite ideological tract, A Nation of Sheep by Senator Goldwater. At one point Kammer turned to a nearby senator and muttered a Latin aphorism from Virgil: “I fear the man of one book.” A year later, Stratton would reach the same conclusion. As a youth delegate to the Republican Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, he looked on with alarm as Goldwater announced that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” The scene in the Cow Palace would frighten Stratton, revealing to him the rougher side of rugged individualism. To most of his colleagues at Boys Nation, however, Stratton seemed mature. He won the nomination and trounced his opponent from Kansas in the general election.

  IT got quiet inside the Boys Nation buses as they pulled through the White House gate from the south. You could hear the motors idling and the pneumatic whoosh when the driver opened the door to talk to a guard. In his seat, Richard Stratton, a bundl
e of nerves, whispered to himself the words he would say to President Kennedy: “… Mr. President, we’re all grateful to you for having us here.” Bill Clinton was at the front of the first bus. He wanted a prime spot in the Rose Garden. Stay in lines, the counselors reminded them. Walk directly to the lawn below the speaker’s podium. Do not throw elbows. Don’t run. You represent your states and Boys Nation and the American Legion. Do us proud.

  With that the buses unloaded and a most awkward, comic sort of race began. Without running, without pushing, several of the boys moved as quickly as they could to outpace the others, speed-walking while attempting to go unnoticed. “There was a barely controlled eagerness,” according to Larry Taunton. “You don’t want to push and shove, yet move with extreme rapidity to get to the front.” With his long strides, Clinton took the lead and placed himself in the front row, just to the right of the outdoor podium, perhaps fifteen feet or so from where the president would stand. Only a few dignitaries, counselors, and protective agents would get between him and President Kennedy.

  At quarter to ten, Kennedy stepped out from the back portico. Behind him were the four chiefs of staff of the uniformed services, in the middle of an Oval Office discussion with the president, who was trying to persuade them to support a nuclear test ban treaty. Kennedy strode to the podium, looked out at the boys in a semicircle below him, and introduced General Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, Admiral George Anderson of the Navy, General Earle Wheeler of the Army, and General David Shoup of the Marine Corps. (Decades later, one of the most vivid memories of many of the boys would be that of Curtis LeMay standing behind Kennedy with an unlit stogie in his mouth.)

  “I read about your meeting last night,” Kennedy said—referring to an article in The Washington Post that put the boys’ treatment of the civil rights issue in the most positive light, taking note only of their statement that “racism is a cancerous disease” and must be eliminated. “It seemed to me that you showed more initiative in some ways than the Governors’ Conference down in Miami, and we are impressed by it.”

  Richard Stratton was still whispering his lines to himself when the president said something that cleared his mind and put him at ease. “And I want to congratulate Mr. Stratton on his overwhelming majority,” Kennedy said, smiling. “Those of us who just skim by are properly admiring.”

  The White House and its grounds, Kennedy told the boys, were constant reminders of the best in American history. Eyes turned as he pointed south. “These trees which are just behind you were planted by Andrew Jackson when he was here in the White House. The tallest tree over there was planted by the first President who came to the White House, John Adams. So all around you is the story of the United States and I think all of us have a pride in our country.” He had recently returned from a trip to Europe, the president went on, “and was impressed once again by the strong feelings most people have, even though they may on occasions be critical of our policies … that without the United States they would not be free and with the United States they are free, and it is the United States which stands guard all the way from Berlin to Saigon.” Kennedy concluded by praising the American Legion for looking to the future as well as the past, a future represented by the boys, of whom he said: “No group could be more appropriately visiting here now. We want you to feel very much at home.”

  When the applause receded, Stratton approached the podium, uttered his few lines of thanks from the boys, and handed Kennedy a Boys Nation polo shirt, which the president said he would wear that weekend at Hyannis Port. Kennedy shook hands with a few Legion officials at his side and turned as though he might head back to the Oval Office, but he did not. As the president walked toward them, the boys surged forward. Clinton was the first to shake his hand. The sixteen-year-old from Hot Springs lost his breath, his face contorted in what he would later call “my arthritis of the face.” The Boys Nation photographer was nearby, snapping away. Kennedy suddenly retreated, smiling, and headed back to the White House, his cuff links and tie clasp intact.

  Most of the boys were riding an adrenaline high when they left the Rose Garden. After an early lunch at American Legion headquarters, they visited the Pentagon, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument. Visitors were still allowed to climb the stairs to the top of the monument in those days, and the boys took to the stairwell with glee—running all the way to the top in a wild, noisy race. Benny Galloway, an all-state football player from South Carolina, easily outran the field on the way up. On the ride back to the Maryland campus, the boys joked about the race and boasted about the morning at the Rose Garden. Where were you? Did you get to shake his hand? I touched his suit! He looked right at me! They spent the rest of the evening calling collect to their folks back home.

  The next morning, their last in Washington, they returned from a day at the FBI and the Capitol to find a bulletin board at Harford Hall cluttered with photographs taken during the week by a Legion photographer. Each picture was numbered so that the boys could order copies. They mobbed the board, writing down their selections. Along with an overwhelming feeling that in Washington he had seen the career he longed for, Bill Clinton brought home a captured moment bonding his joyous present with his imagined future, a photograph he had been bound and determined to get—the picture that his mother wanted.

  CHAPTER ONE

  HOPE AND CHANCE

  WILLIAM JEFFERSON BLYTHE III arrived in the world one month ahead of schedule. He was lifted from his mother’s womb in a Caesarian section performed at Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, Arkansas, at an hour past dawn on August 19, 1946, weighing six pounds and eight ounces. The birth of this fatherless son in a place called Hope did not go unheralded. There had been record heat the day before, exceeding a hundred degrees, followed by a ferocious thunderstorm that cracked and boomed all night, igniting three fires in town. The local moviehouse happened to be showing a film that captured his twenty-three-year-old mother’s predicament: The Young Widow, starring Jane Russell.

  His mother, the young widow, Virginia Dell Blythe, took him home to Hervey Street, to a big white house with hardwood floors and French doors where she lived with her parents, Edith and Eldridge Cassidy, who from then on were known to him in the southern vernacular as “Mammaw” and “Pappaw.” His first gifts were a rocking horse and a pair of sandals, followed by a silver spoon and napkin holder. The first word he later uttered, as recorded in his baby book, was “Pappaw.” This was, if true, also his first political decision, the safest choice, for if Billy had babbled something resembling “Mama,” his mother and grandmother might have argued over which one of them he meant. It is central to understanding the man he would become that he began life in Hope with no father and, in essence, two mothers who competed for his love and attention. Virginia carried him and bore him, but once he was home, Edith assumed that she was in control. Virginia might escape to walk him in the stroller or rock with him on the front porch swing, but when he was in the house, Edith ordered his life. She had him eating and drinking at assigned times, pushing food in his mouth if necessary, and his sleep was regulated to the minute, napping and waking with metronomic discipline.

  This was Mammaw’s way. Edith Grisham Cassidy was forty-five when her grandson was born. She was one of Hope’s dazzling characters, an imposing figure: short, wide, and intense, with penetrating eyes and high cheek-bones, her hair cropped and dyed a licorice black, her face a daily creation, framed by spit curls, heavily powdered in bright white, with circles of rouge on her cheeks and deep red lipstick, looking somewhat like a stylized character in a Japanese kabuki show. She was a respected private nurse in her small town, and loved to wear the uniform: the white headpiece, the white starched dress and white stockings, the flowing navy blue cape inscribed in golden initials. She got around Hope in a big Buick, her face barely visible over the steering wheel, and it seemed to one of her nieces that whenever Aunt Edith drove by, the car was tilting noticeably to the driver’s side.

  Most things tended t
o tilt in her direction. She was ambitious and tem-peramental, unsatisfied with her lot in life as the wife of a good-natured man who excelled at making friends but not at making money. She taught herself nursing through a correspondence course after growing restless as a housewife and frustrated by a style of life beneath her expectations. Sometimes it appeared that she was kinder to outsiders than to her own family, with the exception of grandson Billy once he came along. She was devoted to her patients, ministering to them with tender care, if necessary staying overnight to treat the sickest among them, occasionally traveling to Arizona in winter and Wisconsin in summer to nurse convalescents. When she was off regular duty, she often drove up to the black section of Hope and cared for the children of domestics and orderlies.

  Edith had a mercurial nature, a rollicking sense of humor coupled with a mean streak most often directed at her daughter or husband. She had taken out the whip to punish Virginia for childhood indiscretions, and even when the daughter became a mother of her own and had outgrown the switch, she could not escape Edith’s criticisms and orders. Nor could Edith’s husband, who had known her since their early childhoods spent on neighboring cotton farms near the hamlet of Bodcaw ten miles east of Hope. Her temper grew fiercer over the years. She was a yeller and a thrower: Eldridge became adept at ducking flying objects. Her relatives would later talk openly about relationships they thought she had had with a few doctors, yet she constantly accused her husband of being too friendly with some of the ladies in town.