First In His Class (17 page)

Clinton played into Modglin's hand by building his campaign around a nineteen-point document whose title revealed its sober attitude: “
A Realistic
Approach to Student Government.” One page listed his achievements at Georgetown—president of freshman and sophomore classes, chairman of freshman orientation committee, chairman of Sports Week, chairman of the unification campaign to merge the student councils of East Campus and the Yard, listed in
Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities
, Dean's List, chairman of Interdenominational Services, editor of the first-ever collegewide student directory—a list that seemed more impressive to parents than to most college students in 1967. His specific proposals were moderate, from asking for lower parking costs and student-written course critiques to demanding less dictatorial advisers in the Institute of Languages and Linguistics and better courses in the junior year abroad program.

But Clinton not only misread the way his college résumé might be perceived by his peers, he underestimated the mood of rebellion against the school administration and its paternalistic rules. According to Jim Moore, Clinton related to the Jesuit management “in a positive way—as usual.
He wanted
to co-opt the management and convince them they were wrong and turn them around. Some people felt Bill wouldn't be tough enough to get the administration to loosen up in its control of our lives and curricula. Georgetown students were just discovering that they could sometimes get authority figures to bend and change. Bill's approach was too slow for them.”

Clinton understood what was happening to him, and Kit Ashby chided him for his reluctance to criticize Modglin, even in private. “
Bill never
wanted to say, ‘That guy's an asshole!'” He would say, ‘That's an interesting guy,' or whatever. We used to kid him about that—‘Come on, Bill,' we'd say, ‘Form the mouth, ass … hole'—but his basic instinct was to find, even with the most obvious asshole, something good. We wanted him to get angry in that campaign but he would not do it.” Clinton was still keeping faith with the philosophy that Judge Holt ingrained in him the previous summer: Never stoop to the level of the opposition. He told Jim Moore that he felt his approach was reasonable and that in the end the majority of students would understand his message. He would not pander, he said, to “the radical segment of the student body.”

To call Modglin and his supporters radical is a stretch. The extent of Modglin's political activism was that he had prayed for peace during an antiwar vigil on campus and had participated, as Clinton had, in the school's volunteer program in the inner city. In many ways he was to the
right of Clinton, and showed no qualms about bargaining for votes anywhere he could find them.
He struck
an alliance with the conservative Delta Phi fraternity, the arch rival of Clinton's Alpha Phi Omega, by promising them the coveted chairmanship of the Diplomats Ball. (On election day, Modglin recalled later, “guys emerged from the frat house in a drunken stupor and were led to the polls” to vote against Clinton.)

Clinton'
s allies
worked tirelessly for him. Denise Hyland had become so attuned to Bill's political needs that she carefully selected a dorm room that year in Darnell Hall on the side near the busiest walking path so that she could stick Clinton signs in her window to the best effect. She and her friends made hundreds of yellow and red cardboard campaign buttons and distributed “This Is Clinton Country” signs in all the dorms. They went around on a door-to-door canvass, only to discover that their candidate was now turning people off who had once admired him. The election was painful. Kit Ashby later said he did not realize “the depth of negative feelings until near the end,” when many of his friends told him they were going with Modglin.

Whatever chance Clinton had of overcoming the perception that he was the machine candidate was wiped out in the final week when his campaign was involved in two dirty tricks. The first misdeed was a mild one—a newsletter supporting Clinton called “
The Spirit
of '67” was censured by the East Campus Election Committee for claiming endorsements of seniors without their permission.
The second
episode involved an overreaction by campaign manager David Matter. There were campaign posters plastered all over campus, but Clinton's seemed to be disappearing. After a week of what he took to be sign-stealing by the opposition, Matter decided to retaliate. “We stayed up all night and went through the entire campus and tore down every single Modglin poster. Bill was not involved. But I was using his car, the white Buick convertible. I piled the Modglin posters in the car and drove to an overlook over the George Washington Parkway and threw them over the hillside. And I got caught.”

The election
was on a Friday. Clinton's fraternity brothers in Alpha Phi, wearing blue and gold armbands symbolizing their impartiality, counted the votes that night in the Hall of Nations in the Walsh Building, the scene of two previous Clinton victory celebrations. Both candidates were there along with dozens of their supporters. As the vote tabulations were placed on a chalkboard, dorm by dorm, it became clear quite early that “the Modge Rebellion” had carried the day. The final vote was 717 for Modglin and 570 for Clinton. The rebels in white hats shouted: “Modglin! Modglin! Modglin!” and lifted their unlikely champion on their shoulders to carry him out of the room. “I was completely euphoric,” Modglin recalls. “And Bill looked like he was in shock.” Clinton stayed behind to deliver a concession
speech in which he thanked his campaign workers and wished Modglin the best of luck. Then he and his friends went over to what was supposed to be a victory party organized by Denise Hyland at the house Jim Moore and Kit Ashby were living in on Potomac Avenue.

Lyda Holt, who had taken a deep interest in Clinton's campaign from her long-distance perch down at Mary Baldwin College, forsook any social activities that weekend night and stood by a pay telephone booth outside her dormitory making calls every thirty minutes trying to get the results. She never got through to Clinton and he never called her back. “As the night wore on I thought, Oh, Lord, that's not a good sign. I never heard from him, so I figured he lost.”

Matter, who took personal responsibility for his candidate's demise, was inconsolable at the party, feeling so bad that he started crying. Clinton hugged him again. “Bill was as strong as can be, hugging me,” Matter said later. “He was concerned about my welfare that evening and thereafter. I took it far harder than he.” On the outside, perhaps; but inside, Clinton suffered a deep pain that he shared with a few close friends. Kit Ashby knew that his friend “really felt burned. He learned in later years how to take punches, but that one really hurt because it was so personal. He hurts very badly when someone says, ‘I don't like you, you're no damn good.' He thought his heart was in the right place. But there were more than twelve hundred and fifty people who knew him and more than half voted against him. It hurt.”

The lesson, Clinton told Jim Moore that night, was that he had not been listening to people hard enough. “His response was, ‘If I do it again, I'll just have to work harder. Instead of handbills under every door, I'll have to talk to everybody in person. I'll have to find out the people I thought would be with me who voted for the other guy and go out and talk to those people.' It was all a matter of working harder.”

Yet life moves on quickly for the young. The very night that he cried on Clinton's shoulder, Matter ended in bliss with a girl he met at the party. Modglin went on to a senior year of leadership that was marked more by chaos than rebellion—he flunked two courses and nearly got booted out of school. And Clinton, relieved of student politics, was free to concentrate on a competition of a different sort, a campaign for a prestigious graduate school scholarship that he might not have had a chance to win had the majority of his peers at Georgetown not considered him a shade too smooth to lead their student council.

A
T
same time that he struggled with political rejection, Clinton sought personal redemption of a sort, a final resolution of his relationship with his
stepfather. Roger Clinton's physical decline, obvious for years, was now taking a life-threatening turn. Two years earlier, back on Scully Street, he had been sitting at the dinette when Virginia looked over at him and said, “
Roger, your neck
is swollen!” One of Virginia's close friends in the Hot Springs medical community suggested that Roger check into the Duke Medical Center in North Carolina for tests and treatment. There they discovered that he had cancer in a gland behind his ear and recommended surgery. Roger would not agree to anything that altered his appearance. He agreed to have the biopsy, but told her that he would never have a disfiguring operation. The cancer was fought with radiation instead. Roger made the long trip to Durham four times for treatment.

Bill visited
Roger Clinton several times that spring of his junior year. He took Denise Hyland with him once. She remembers that she wore a navy blue suit and Bill a coat and tie, and that the weekend evoked a feeling of overwhelming sadness. But at no time during the drive down to Durham and back and never during their three-year relationship did Clinton confide in Denise about his stepfather's drinking and abuse. She was not alone in that regard. Despite the trauma that Roger had put the family through over the years, Bill hid much of the animosity he might have felt. As confessional as Clinton was about other subjects, he never told his friends in high school or in college about his stepfather's darker side, though they might have seen it accidentally during visits to Scully Street.
Lyda Holt
visited the house one summer and saw Roger stagger and throw up violently into a wastebasket. But to Clinton's friends, he seemed like a vague figure. Clinton did not mention him often, and when he did it was with formal respect.

During his years at Georgetown, Clinton was distanced from the family turmoil but could not rid himself of the guilt he felt about Roger's troubles and his inability to resolve them. “…
I know
I have never been much help to you—never had the courage to come and talk about it,” he wrote that spring in a letter to Roger in which he sought, finally, to get his stepfather to turn to him for help. “You ought to look everywhere for help, Daddy,” Clinton wrote. “You ought to write me more—people—even some of my political enemies—confide in me….” But now that Roger was weak and ill, the need was not so much for reform as for reconciliation. The same son who at age fourteen had ordered his stepfather to stand up and listen carefully as he told him never to strike his mother again, now at age twenty-one felt sympathy for a defeated man struggling to stay alive.

“
Daddy has
been so sick,” he wrote to Denise. “But there's something wonderful now—he knows for sure—as much for sure as can be—that he has post-radiation sickness, which will endure for a long time but is not a recurrence of the malignancy we feared. The prospect of getting well boosts his spirit. He has fought so hard, so bravely—maybe the only battle he's ever really faced. Surely he'll be allowed to win.”

•  •  •

W
HEN
the school year was out, Clinton did not return home to Arkansas. He kept working in the back room at the foreign relations committee in the mornings and had signed up for two summer school courses at Georgetown for the afternoons. Before classes started,
he and
Tommy Caplan took a vacation up the coast. In New York City, they toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection, where they saw a self-portrait of Rembrandt, a painting, Clinton told Denise later, that left him “truly entranced for the first time in my life by an artist's work.” When they were together, this voluble duo—the writer from Baltimore and his big-handed political buddy—knew how to have a good time. That night, on Caplan's tab, they took rooms at the Carlyle Hotel and “in a fit of gluttony had dinner at the restaurant and then ordered room service.”

The binge
left Clinton wallowing in the guilt that often enveloped him when it came to food and willpower. When he returned to Washington, he told Denise that he was looking forward to the discipline that his summer schedule would impose on him, a routine that would “reintroduce me to sleep, exercise and good food.” When he started jogging that summer, his friends were surprised. He had not been much of an athlete and certainly never seemed the running type. So why did he start running now? Perhaps a hint came in a letter to Denise. “This running is a great deal,” he concluded a bit prematurely. “You can run for 30 minutes or so and then eat all you want and put on no weight.”

A more likely reason was that Clinton had been encouraged by Senator Fulbright to begin the process of seeking a Rhodes Scholarship, an honor then awarded yearly to thirty-two American men who were sent off to Oxford University in England for further academic training. Fulbright had won a Rhodes Scholarship while at the University of Arkansas and sailed for England in the fall of 1924 as an American innocent, returning as a pipe-smoking, tweeded intellectual who had enjoyed what he called the best years of his life at Oxford. The scholarship had always been associated with athleticism—Fulbright had played tennis at Arkansas, and Bill Bradley, the Princeton University basketball star, had just won one—but superior physical skills were not mandatory. Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist industrialist who founded the scholarship, said that he was looking for neither the pure intellectual nor the pure athlete, but “the best man for the world's fight—an all-rounder, but of a special kind: an all-rounder with a bulge; some outstanding quality, be it of character, personality or ability.” Clinton had some bulges of the sort Rhodes discussed, but to be certain, he wanted to minimize any that might appear at his waist.