America's Greatest 20th Century Presidents (33 page)

Senator Fulbright

Upon graduating from Georgetown University with a B.S. in Foreign Service, Bill Clinton earned a legendary Rhodes Scholarship to go study Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the world-famous University of Oxford and specifically its University College (endearingly known as just “Univ”). This is where, among other distinguished people, he would meet Robert Reich, the great social scientist who became Clinton’s Secretary of Labor.. It is during this time that Bill Clinton’s eyes were opening to how America was perceived by the world, how America perceived the world, and the compatability and clashing that took place among the two views. He took part in the Vietnam War protests and even a moratorium event, and he would later be accused of dodging the draft by using Fulbright’s office. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Army officer Col. Eugene Holmes, who was involved in Clinton's case, wrote a notarized statement that read, "I was informed by the draft board that it was of interest to Senator Fullbright's office that Bill Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar, should be admitted to the ROTC program... I believe that he purposely deceived me, using the possibility of joining the ROTC as a ploy to work with the draft board to delay his induction and get a new draft classification."

Clinton never quite finished his degree at Oxford because he was admitted to the law school at Yale University and had to return in 1970 to take his place at the school. The next year, in the Yale Law School library he would meet the woman who would change his life and reinforce his already progressive instincts: Hillary Rodham, a recent feminist graduate of Wellesley College. According to both Hillary and Bill years later, after watching him try to steal glances at her over the course of many days, Hillary came over to Bill and said, “If we are going to continue to stare at each other, we should at least know each other’s names.” After graduating from law school, the Clintons moved in together. According to Hillary, she took both the Arkansas and the District of Columbia bar exams. Having failed the District of Columbia bar exam but passed the Arkansas exam, she took it as a divine signal and moved to Arkansas to help Bill run for Congress.

The relationship between Bill and Hillary might be one of the most dissected in American history, thanks to Bill’s adultery, their seemingly insatiable ambitions, and the fact that they both seem to have alpha-dog personalities. In many ways, the Clintons are not just husband and wife or lovers or political partners; their relationship encompasses all of these roles and it seems to be something more, something higher that not many people can comprehend. At this stage of their lives and careers especially, they seem to be friends who reinforce each other.

Chapter 3: Clinton and His Era

If it is true that the character of a person is shaped by the world as it is when they are a young adult, then the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement are the lens through which Clinton sees the world. Significant legislative achievements during this period of the Civil Rights Movement — undoubtedly results of
Brown
— were passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964,
[4]
which banned discrimination based on "race, color, religion, or national origin" in employment practices and public accommodations; the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
[5]
which restored and secured voting rights for all Americans; the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965,
[6]
which had less to do with then-citizens and more to do with potential future citizens and which substantially lessened the barrier to United States entry to non-European immigrants; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968,
[7]
which forbade discrimination in the sale or rental of accommodation.

Together these laws became known as Lyndon Johnson’s
Great Society Program.
Another component of this program was Johnson’s nomination of Justice Thurgood Marshall, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) chief advocate in
Brown
and other cases, to the United States Supreme Court. 26 years later, when President Clinton would name his own first Supreme Court nominee (then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit) he would call her the “Thurgood Marshall of Women’s Rights”, a superlative description to say the least. The connection with the
Great Society
era was apparent, and perhaps they were the terms through which he wanted to frame his own presidency nearly three decades later.

Perhaps the most overlooked legislative provision -- as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act – came after President John F. Kennedy's term (during President Lyndon B. Johnson) and upon President Kennedy's exhortation: 42 U.S.C. § 2000d (tying federal funds to non-discrimination).
[8]
In requiring that programs that receive federal moneys end racial discrimination, by and large Congress has free rein.
[9]
There is evidence in the congressional record that such evidence was being documented.
[10]
In greater numbers, African Americans re-entered politics in the South, and across the country young people were inspired to action. Both of these elements would go a long way to helping elect Clinton to the presidency in 1993, and he knew it. Nor would Clinton be allowed to forget this reality. Through this Great Society epoch, the Supreme Court did uphold these federal laws as consistent with Congress's interstate commerce powers, as well as its authority "to enforce by appropriate legislation" the Civil War Amendments.
[11]
It is doubtful whether that would have happened in today’s climate, given the present Supreme Court’s reluctance to readily embrace the Congressional commerce power since the mid-1990’s.
[12]

Affirmative action — initiated by President Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 — continues to divide American society more as a fault line than a significant factor that makes a difference. Many observers have commented that whereas middle-class and more socioeconomically potent African Americans and Hispanics are aided by affirmative action, poorer African Americans and Hispanics are not;
[13]
indeed, that society might be suffering from a false sense of complacency about disparities. Affirmative action’s supporters claim that it could not be unconstitutional because the 1866 Freedmen's Bureau Act, a federal law that gave many of its benefits just to newly freed slaves, was passed by the
same
Congress that had passed the Fourteenth Amendment,
[14]
thereby arguing that constitutional claims by disadvantaged whites are without merit.

Defenders of this racially-preferential interpretation of the 1866 Act pointed to the need for this sort of differential treatment — arguably a factor still extant today — and stated that for poor and socioeconomically disadvantaged whites “civil rights and immunities are already sufficiently protected by the possession of political power, the absence of which in the case provided for necessitates governmental protection.”
[15]
In 1978,
[16]
throughout the 1980s and 1990s,
[17]
and notably in 2003,
[18]
the Supreme Court had upheld race-based affirmative action only insofar as race was
one of many factors
and not a decisive or overwhelming factor. The Supreme Court has just recently granted review to decide the University of Texas undergraduate affirmative action program in
Fisher v. University of Texas
(2011),
[19]
and given its current inclination the Court probably will use “equal protection of the laws” to repudiate affirmative action across the board.              

Two other factors that may have helped make significant inroads were changing social attitudes due to stifling worldview of the 1950’s and the Vietnam War. Clinton lost some close friends in the War but his own reputation has remained tainted by the accusation, including by the military officer Col. Eugene Holmes, that Bill Clinton was a draft-dodger, albeit one who used the connections of his powerful mentor Senator Fulbright to evade service. Certainly it was an accusation that would haunt Clinton during his first presidential campaign in 1992.

What else did the Vietnam War mean, especially for civil rights (the other change happening around now)? The War reinforced the realization of the necessity to give African Americans equal citizenship stature and also America’s renewed need, just like during the
Brown
era against the Soviet Union, to show its in-house
equality
to guard against the North Vietnamese Communists’ propaganda that showcased American
inequality
.

Clinton was profoundly appreciative and knowledgeable of all these overarching trends, as well as micro details. Clinton also appreciated the importance of the changing attitudes to women’s rights and roles (the Feminist Revolution) across the country and the world. If he had not held them himself, they certainly would have been instilled in him by Hillary.

Chapter 4: Governor Clinton

After leaving Yale with his law degree, Clinton spent just one year as a law professor at the University of Arkansas before trying his hand at politics. Running as a Democrat in 1974, Clinton lost his first race for the U.S. House of Representatives by 4% of the votes cast against incumbent Republican John Paul Hammerschmidt. What was extraordinary was his resilience. The very next day Clinton was in the town square’s main street campaigning again.

In 1976, Clinton ran for Attorney General of Arkansas and this time he won. Among other issues, Clinton began to support the death penalty fervently, a complete reversal of his earlier stance. Clinton would, throughout his political career, conduct on the death penalty issue what his legal hero John Marshall, the fourth and arguably the greatest chief justice of the United States, was accused of by Thomas Jefferson (Clinton’s other favorite Founding hero): a “twistification.”
[20]
Clinton appointed and supported the appointments of relatively progressive judges who would limit or strike down the death penalty while Clinton himself could be in agreement with the voters by strongly supporting the death penalty. This position would confuse his Democratic supporters in 1992 during Clinton’s first presidential campaign, when Clinton would return to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a death row inmate whose lawyers claimed was mentally retarded; the goal was to “code” and convey to independent voters that Clinton supported the death penalty, details of an individual case and its peculiar considerations notwithstanding. Many newspaper and press reports believed that Clinton wanted to eschew at all costs a “soft on crime” allegation that had cost him the 1980 gubernatorial election and went a long way to sinking Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election.
[21]

Of course, the Attorney General’s office was never meant to be the last stop for Bill Clinton. It was just the stepping stone, and everyone knew it. Clinton could foresee that the heyday of liberal ideology in America was past (if it had ever arrived at all), and it was time for a centrist “Third Way”. To that end, Clinton branded himself a “New Democrat”, and he won the Governor’s office in Arkansas in 1978 at just 32 years old. As the youngest governor in the nation, the sobriquet “Boy Governor” was apt, and it stuck.

Governor Clinton and President Carter, 1978

As governor of Arkansas, Clinton worked extremely hard on educational reform in order to lift Arkansas out of its position as the lowest ranked state on education, and he also focused on revamping the state’s infrastructure. He assigned Hillary, whom he had married in 1975, to chair the committee on health care reform. But Governor Clinton had also been forced to impose a rather disliked motor vehicle tax, and Arkansans also were upset with him over the fact that Cuban refugees detained in Fort Chaffee were able to escape state guards. In the 1980 gubernatorial election, Bill Clinton was defeated by Republican challenger Frank D. White, leading him to joke that he was “the youngest ex-governor in the nation.”