First In His Class (11 page)

The course Sebes taught freshmen non-Catholics in 1964 was known around campus by its nickname, “Buddhism for Baptists,” and it seemed especially designed for the young Baptist from Hot Springs. Sebes, according to one of his disciples, Father James Walsh, “devised the course to present world religions from within. When he taught Buddhism, he laid out the beliefs and practices as though he were a devout Buddhist. He taught Islam as a convinced Muslim. Taoism was second nature to him. He never said ‘they,' but always ‘we'—‘we Hindus,' ‘we Buddhists.' It was sympathetic imagination—the ability to put yourself into the world view of other people.” To the extent that Sebes's approach to learning took hold, Walsh believed, “students came away with the instinct to look at issues from various angles—that instinct eschews polarizing tendencies and values the ability to find common ground. This is not congenial to everybody, of course. People who tend to be literal-minded might label those who try to practice it as duplicitous, even slick.”

Otto Hentz, then a twenty-four-year-old Jesuit not yet ordained, who taught Clinton's introductory philosophy course, picked up where Sebes left off.
Hentz championed
the philosophy of analogical imagination. Drawing on the work of the Jesuit theologian William Lynch, Hentz presented his students with three perspectives on the world around them: the univo-cal, where everything is clear and distinct, black and white, if you say “chair,” all it means is chair; the equivocal, where everything is differences and uncertainty; and the analogical, where clarity is found within complex-ity, not despite it. People who are analogical tend to be misunderstood by univocalists, who need to make everything absolute, Hentz would say, but the analogical thinkers more often make their way successfully through
the world. He saw an analogical mind at work in the essays of eighteen-year-old Bill Clinton.

One day after class Hentz invited Clinton out for dinner, an invitation no hungry freshman would turn down, and as they sat across from each other in a booth, Hentz sipping a beer, Clinton engulfing a hamburger, the teacher began making a sales pitch for the Jesuit order. He talked about how Jesuits got an exemption from the Pope to be active in politics, retelling his favorite joke that Jesuits say the missing line in Creation is “then God created politics and saw that politics is good.”

“
I think
you should seriously consider becoming a Jesuit,” he said to Clinton. “I've been impressed with your papers.”

Clinton laughed and asked, “Don't you think I oughta become a Catholic first?”

“You're not?” Hentz replied.

“No, I'm not. I'm a Southern Baptist.”

Hentz had not considered that possibility. “I saw all the Jesuit traits in him—serious, political, empathetic. I just assumed he was Catholic,” he said.

If there was one subject on the East Campus that brought everyone together, it was the class on the development of Western civilization taught by Carroll Quigley, a layman. As Clinton later said, “
Half the
people at Georgetown thought he was a bit crazy and the other half thought he was a genius and they were both right.” But Quigley unified the campus because
his course
was mandatory—and legendary. Freshmen inevitably heard upperclassmen tell them strange and wonderful stories about the man—his quirks and his intimidating tests.

Quigley grew up on the edge of the Irish ghetto in Boston, went on to Harvard and, with his nasal accent and dropped r's here and added r's there, sounded rather like John Kennedy. He was a tall, slender man with graying hair, a bald patch in the back, a sharp nose, and dark, penetrating eyes, and when he was lecturing in his classroom in White-Gravenor, strolling back and forth, his voice rising and falling, he gave the impression of a crazed bald eagle. He seemed intimidating and arrogant offstage, yet he was master of the classroom lecture, full of drama and sweep, determined to teach his students how to think and what to think. “You've never met anyone else in your lives,” he would tell them, “whose mission was trying to save Western civilization.” His approach to history was broad. His life's work, a thousand-page tome entitled
Tragedy and Hope
, was to be the culmination of two decades of lectures, presenting a systematic vision of history, placing events and trends into categories to find order in chaos. It was then on the verge of publication.

His exams were notorious, with questions as sweeping as his theories.
Days before each exam, Quigley would write out the questions and his own preferred answers in fountain pen with a long, looping hand inside a blue book, so that his grading assistants could measure the student efforts against perfection. On exam day, students were not allowed to ask questions about his questions. Jim Moore, who was in Clinton's class and competed with him for top grades, would never forget one question that “caused most of the class to tank.” It concerned Anatolia, although Quigley had never used that term before when talking about the area that became modern Turkey. “People were saying, holy shit, where the hell is Anatolia? Some would write about Greece, Mesopotamia, the Hittites, they had no idea what they were writing about.” Which was fine with Quigley, who regularly flunked one-fifth of the class. In Clinton's day there were few vocal complaints. Jon R. Reynolds, who took the course a few years before Clinton, found Quigley “capricious and arbitrary—but on the other hand there were many gas-bags with facile pens who were accustomed to BS-ing their way through who were quite properly skewered.”

Clinton never had to dip too deeply into the gas bag. While most students were afraid to approach Quigley, Clinton often strolled up to the front after class and engaged the professor in conversation. He seemed to emerge from those huddles feeling a bit more confident about the next test, amazing his friends by guessing what two questions would be asked, and pleasing Quigley by framing his answers within Quigley's well-defined system.

Quigley's lectures were packed with students anticipating great theat-rics. The best attended lecture on campus was Quigley's discourse on Plato. He reviled Plato as a precursor of the Nazis and dismissed
The Republic
as a fascist tract. He was especially repelled by Plato's Principle of Specialization: that individuals have one and only one proper function, a function to which they are born, and can only be happy if they accept that role and do not try to change their place in society. Quigley's contempt for Plato would reach its climax with an amazing display of classroom showmanship. He would rip pages
from the
book as he tore it apart ver-bally, and finally conclude by heaving it out his second-floor window. One year he gave the lecture while construction crews were at work outside. He opened his window, let the book fly, turned to the class, shouted:
“Sieg Heil!”
—and at that moment there was a detonation on the construction site. Even Professor Quigley was stunned.

At the very least, Quigley got his students thinking. They would go back to their dorms and debate his attack on Plato late into the night. And at the most, Quigley left some lifelong lessons with his students, none more than Clinton. As much as Clinton and his classmates enjoyed the Plato lecture, it was Quigley's lecture on future preference that stuck with them. “The
thing that got you into this classroom today is belief in the future, belief that the future can be better than the present and that people will and should sacrifice in the present to get to that better future,” Quigley would say. “That belief has taken man out of the chaos and deprivation that most human beings toiled in for most of history to the point we are at today. One thing will kill our civilization and way of life—when people no longer have the will to undergo the pain required to prefer the future to the present. That's what got your parents to pay this expensive tuition. That's what got us through two wars and the Depression. Future preference. Don't ever forget that.”

Over the ensuing decades, Clinton rarely delivered a major political speech that did not include a paraphrase of that lecture from the crazy genius who taught him Western civilization.

F
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the nursing home in Hope, located in what once was Julia Chester Hospital, the place where she used to work as a nurse, in the same room where her grandson was born, Edith Cassidy marked off the days until Billy would come back to Arkansas for Christmas. She was sixty-three and lived alone in a single room. She kept a stack of envelopes at her nightstand already stamped and addressed to William J. Clinton at Box 232 Hoya Station. Next to the envelopes were his letters and postcards to her—wishing her a happy Thanksgiving and thanking her for sending a picture of Mack McLarty and his cousin Phil; telling her that he had caught his first cold and gone to the infirmary to get some pénicillin tablets (“the handkerchiefs you always taught me to carry have really come in handy”); bubbling with the news that the daughter of the president of the Philippines was in his philosophy class. Age and illness had reduced Edith's handwriting to a nervous scrawl. She documented her life in a palm-sized blue-green address book that contained the names and addresses of patients she had treated in her nursing trips to Wisconsin and Arizona, as well as the comings and goings of her college boy. “Billy came home from Washington DC Friday Dec. 18 1964,” she wrote to herself in an open page near the back of the book. “He was here Dec. 24.”

Aside from the trip down the highway from Hot Springs to Hope to see his mammaw, Clinton spent most of the Christmas break on Scully Street, shooting baskets in the driveway, reading books, working crossword puzzles, playing with his pudgy little brother Roger, now and then going out to a party at night with his high school friends.
He went
to a dance near the high school and ran into Phil Jamison, who was suffering as a first-year cadet at Texas A&M and trying to transfer to the Naval Academy. Jamison was stunned to hear that Clinton had been elected president of the Georgetown
freshman class. “How could the only guy from Arkansas show up there and within a few months win an election like that?” Jamison won-dered. Before that, Jamison's feelings about Clinton's political ambitions were “maybe yes, maybe no.” But from then on, nothing Clinton accomplished surprised him. The party near the high school lingered in Jamison's memory for another reason. The senior class behind theirs was a bit wilder, readier to party and to challenge authority than they had been. Several of the boys in that class brought alcohol to the dance and got in trouble for it. They accused Clinton of turning them in for drinking. Jamison later vouched that they had nothing to do with it: “I can safely say that I didn't turn them in and Bill didn't either. But they considered us prudes and jumped to that conclusion.”

In high school at Hot Springs or in college at Georgetown, Clinton seemed oblivious of how he was perceived. He always had people who resented him, who thought he was a phony. A number of his classmates at Georgetown, including some who would later be among his best friends, were at first put off by his irrepressible glad-handing. One fellow freshman, Jim Moore, bonded quickly with Clinton's roommate, Tom Campbell, but could barely tolerate Clinton for most of the first semester. He thought Clinton was too smooth: “
Everybody else
has moods, especially in college, where you have dramatic swings, study hard, party hard, you have the issues of growing up.” Clinton by contrast always seemed positive, upbeat, enthusiastic. Nobody, Moore thought, could maintain that attitude and be for real. He seemed to Moore like the career student body president, more surface than depth.

It was only after the Christmas break, when Carroll Quigley posted first semester grades for his Western civilization class, that Moore began to reconsider those early impressions. Out of 230 students in his freshman course, Quigley had given two A's. Moore got one. Clinton the other. Moore was shocked: here this young pol from Arkansas was as smart as he was. He decided that he should get to know Clinton better.

Among his
fellow student politicians, Clinton stood out as well. Some admired him, some felt a bit overwhelmed by him, and some disliked him and took pleasure in getting under his skin. As president of the junior class when Clinton led the freshmen, Phil Verveer, a liberal activist who was perhaps the most admired undergraduate on the East Campus, worked with Clinton at council meetings once a week. He found Clinton to be deferential to the upperclassmen yet already in a class by himself. All student pols thought they were special, yet knew who among them truly had the skills to go further. Clinton was the one, Verveer decided. He might have been jealous, but Clinton's “disarming style” somehow took the tinge off envy. David Kammer, the freshman vice president, a young
man from southern New Jersey with his own political ambitions, found Clinton disarming in another way. He reminded Kammer of President John-son. “Johnson would say, ‘Let us reason together,' then surround you to the point where you were not reasoning so much as being coerced. There was that contradiction at the center of my perceptions of Bill. He had a smile and a big body and that body language of embracing and getting close and getting done what his goals were.”

To freshman treasurer Paul Maloy, mastermind of the Long Island slate that Clinton had foiled, Clinton was 90 percent bluff and 10 percent blus-ter. They were political and cultural opposites. Maloy was a leader of the campus Young Republicans, Clinton a lifelong Democrat. Maloy was a young man of a few concise words, Clinton a flowery storyteller. Maloy thought the purpose of student life was to have a good time. Clinton took it a bit more seriously. Maloy appreciated the college skill of doing nothing, wasting time, sleeping, drinking after hours at The Tombs. His friends were of the same type. One was known as “The Rack King,” not for his skills with the other sex but for his ability to sleep fifteen to twenty hours at a stretch. And there was Bill Clinton, his big alarm clock tick-ticking away, teaching himself how to live without sleep, moving on to the next thing and the next thing, talking to his buddies while writing a platform, sending notes to Arkansas friends while his college mates were watching Perry Mason, napping only so that he could get up extra early to get a jump on all the Maloys out there. They grated on each other's nerves. Maloy could not stand the way Clinton, a superior student, would feign such deep interest in other people's scholastic standing; it seemed, Maloy thought, that Clinton's first words of greeting were always, “How ya doin? What's your QPI?” (QPI was the grade point average known at Georgetown as the Quality Points Index). Since his QPI was lower than Clinton's, Maloy took the greeting as a pointed jab.