First In His Class (104 page)

Clinton with Denise Hyland (center couple), his steady girlfriend at Georgetown, at a black tie ball with friends—Kit Ashby (far left), Jim Moore (fourth from left), and Tom Campbell (fourth from right).

For his first full-time campaign adventure. Clinton worked on Judge Frank Holt's run for the Democratic nomination for governor of Arkansas. Holt lost the election but helped Clinton land a job on Senator Fulbright's staff.

The young recruits, a coterie of college student leaders who became known as “the Holt Generation,” often worked sixteen-hour days. Clinton eventually became a chauffeur for the judge's wife and two daughters, who barnstormed the state. When the route took them to Hope, Clinton asked if he could give the speech, since his grandmother would be in the audience.

For the Rhodes Scholars in the class of 1968, being in England may have removed them from the chaos and excesses of student activism back home, but it could not rid them of their anxieties and concerns about the draft.

No one had expected Clinton back for his second year at Oxford—his draft status had seemed so hopeless. So Clinton freeloaded for a while with friends before being invited to share a flat at 46 Leckford Road with Strobe Talbott (left), the Russia scholar, and Frank Aller (right), the China scholar and draft resister. Aller's suicide in 1971 marked an end to the sixties for their Rhodes group. Clinton maintained a strong relationship with Talbott, and chose him to be ambassador at large for Russia and the other former Soviet republics and later appointed him deputy secretary of state.

In 1986, eighteen years after the Rhodes Scholars of the class of 1968 sailed across the Atlantic, Robert Reich, who was teaching politics and economics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in the
American Oxonian
: “Rumor has it that Bill will be the Democratic candidate for president in 1988. I just made up that minor, but by the time you read this, the rumor will have spread to the ends of the nation.” Reich's work on industrial policy and world trade became a cornerstone of Clinton's economic thinking, and Reich was appointed secretary of labor.

Clinton was never more in his element than on the campaign trail. Every hand he shook, even corner store he stopped in, every pie supper he attended, helped him transform his image from the long-haired Rhodes Scholar and law professor into a young man of the people.

After working on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry against President Nixon, Hillary Rodham joined Clinton in Arkansas and took a teaching position at the law school. While Clinton was a diffuse and easygoing professor, Rodham was precise and demanding.

Clinton and his chief campaign aide, Paul Fray (left), standing by the tally board on election night in 1974. Clinton lost his race for Congress. The following morning. Clinton was back in downtown Fayetteville shaking hands. He was warming up. The next race had already begun.

With his own election for Arkansas attorney general locked up, Clinton signed on to work on the presidential campaign of fellow southerner Jimmy Carter. Three years later. President 7arter sent Governor-elect Clinton a congratulatory note: “You and I will succeed in meeting the goals for our country by working closely together to serve those whom we represent.”

In January 1979, buti Clinton was sworn in as the youngest governor in the United States in four decades. For the friends of Clinton and Rodham, this first inaugural had the aura of a generational rite of passage. For Virginia Kelley, it was a moment she had been waiting for—and guiding her son toward—his whole life.