First In His Class (53 page)

A former U.S. attorney from Sioux City, Iowa, O'Brien had worked with Bobby Kennedy, a connection that naturally impressed Clinton.
Many of
the women on the staff considered him a chauvinist. He called them “girls,” until one day one of them, Ruthie Fischer, snapped at him, “We're not girls; if we're girls, then you're boys.” Wright later said that O'Brien screamed at her about her hormones and depressed her so much that she turned into a “raging feminist.”

Clinton and Branch led relatively moderate lives in Texas. They drank beer late into the night.
There “was
dope around, but not compared to beer—beer was the drug of choice,” according to Lisa Rogers. Most of Clinton's other contemporaries, including Mauro, Trabulsi, Williams, and Spence, recalled smoking marijuana at late night parties and occasionally at the back picnic tables at Scholz's. They said they did not see Clinton smoke pot. The sexual atmosphere was free and easy. “
Stories of
who slept with whom among Texas Democrats have been a source of titillation for as long as I can remember: sex was always part of the game,” recalled Bebe Champ, who worked on the campaign as an aide to Armstrong, the self-proclaimed Age of Aquarian. “All the women thought Bill was absolutely adorable and precious. I saw his attraction, the groupies around him, but he didn't seem to take it very seriously. As far as spending time with somebody, I didn't see him do a lot of womanizing.” Commissioner White, who had seen his share of sex-hungry politicians during his days in Texas politics, noticed that “
women were
very attracted to Clinton” and that “he obviously liked women”—but that most women-chasers “would rather talk about women than politics and Bill would rather talk about politics.”

Hillary Rodham, who got a job that summer and fall working in a voter registration drive in Texas for the Democratic National Committee, was in Austin with Clinton more than half the time. When she was away, usually in San Antonio, and occasionally back at Yale for her fourth year, the boiler-room women would come by Clinton's office and ask, “Where's Hillary? Where'
s Hillary?”
to the point that Clinton, in exasperation one day, complained, “Gol dang, I couldn't do something if I wanted to!”

When she was around, Rodham sat at a desk next to Clinton's and left a vivid impression on the campaign staff. She wore jeans or brown corduroys to work, sported big square eyeglasses, and walked around carrying pads of yellow paper. Volunteers coordinator Joyce Sampson, then a housewife married to a University of Texas law professor, was “
in awe
of young
women like Hillary who went to law school.” Mark Blumenthal, the hippie-dippie radio man, found her to be
aloof but
intelligent. Bebe Champ thought Rodham was “
not particularly
warm but businesslike—she focused on what she was interested in and shut other things out.” Rodham treated Ruthie Fischer “
like a
little sister—she worried that I wasn't going out enough and that I was putting too much into the election.”

Taylor Branch
welcomed Rodham's presence. He found it easier to talk to her than to Clinton about “more reflective things” such as the collapse of his marriage and the meaning of life. “Bill and I talked business. We laughed. We talked personalities, but we never sat down and philosophized. I was feeling rootless, unhinged, and it was easier to talk to Hillary about those things than to Bill.” Betsey Wright also felt more comfortable with Rodham.
The two
women would sit under the blazing Texas sun at the massive limestone pool at Barton Springs, or across town at the airport waiting for a plane to come in, and talk for hours about the need for more women in politics. “
It was
a nascent feminist movement then. We had both read Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer. And I'd just come off the heady experience of Sissy Farenthold's campaign in Texas,” Wright re-called later. They reinforced each other's ambitions. Rodham thought that Wright's political experience in Texas would be valuable to other women around the country. Wright believed “that women were the ethical and pure force that American politics needed” and considered Rodham a perfect candidate to lead the movement. “I was less interested in Bill's political future than Hillary's. I was obsessed with how far Hillary might go, with her mixture of brilliance, ambition, and self-assuredness. There was an assumption about all the incredible things she could do in the world.”

It was not at all certain during their Texas days that Rodham and Clinton would stay together. They did not see each other exclusively and appeared on the verge of splitting up at least once. San Antonio labor leader Franklin Garcia, a charismatic figure around McGovern headquarters, a fearless organizer and a soothing mystic, helped patch things up. “Franklin, I just want to thank you. You really saved our relationship,” Clinton said to Garcia one night at Scholz's. The couple argued heatedly, yet they also shared a deep passion, according to Roy Spence. “They shared a passion for the dream—the dream of being in politics, of sharing the business of politics.”

T
HE
Watergate break-in, which had entered the political stage in 1972, seemed to have negligible effect on how
the public
viewed the presidential race. The public lack of interest in Watergate troubled Branch and Clinton, but it did not slow them down. One night at their apartment, they talked
for hours about why they could not stop working. It was, according to Branch, the only concentrated philosophical discussion he and Clinton had during the months they worked together. “I thought it odd and curious that even though the polls showed very early it was over, we worked just as hard—we were obsessive. We decided that an awful lot of it had to do with the war. We thought the war would go on four more years, particularly the bombing, if Nixon won. Playing for those stakes made it important. Plus we always had this sense that a huge scandal might break at any moment, making the election close and Texas critical, so we couldn't relax.”

There was no prospect of relaxation in any case. The Texas campaign was in constant turmoil as it tried to deal with historic political forces that it could not control. One such force was the growing disaffection of conservative southern Democrats with the national party, as symbolized by John Connally's embrace of Nixon. Connally's Democrats for Nixon group, funded largely by money from the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP), was running full-page advertisements attacking McGovern on defense, busing, taxes, and welfare. The dilemma for the McGovern forces was how to repudiate Connally and his crowd without alienating Texas Democrats who had not yet abandoned the ticket. It was a fine line.

When the
Texas staff learned that Connally was planning to host a lavish fund-raiser for Nixon at his Floresville ranch, they saw it as a chance to mock the fat-cat ostentation of that event by staging a populist-style tamales-and-beans fiesta for McGovern on a nearby courthouse lawn. Branch and Clinton presented the counter-rally proposal to the Washington staff, which promptly rejected it. McGovern had absorbed too much criticism for his one-thousand-dollars-for-everyone welfare proposal, the Washington staff argued, and a scraggly tamales-and-beans affair might give the impression that they were engaging in class warfare. Gary Hart told them it was important for the campaign not to seem marginal. Clinton and Branch persisted, however, supported by their seasoned Texas advisers, White and Armstrong, who thought the tamale fiesta fell into the category of a classic Texas populist event. Since McGovern would not go, they tried Sargent Shriver. They pitched the idea to him during his next visit in the state. He “thought it was a great idea,” and put it on his schedule.

Threats and counterthreats laced with obscenities flew between the Texas coordinators and the home office in the final stages of the Floresville advance work. The hostility was real but evanescent, the sort of profane give-and-take that seeps into most such relationships, where state coordinators demand more candidate time and money while the national staff tries to keep a larger strategy in force. Branch had worked out an agreement that expenses for the rally would be shared by Texas and Washington, but Washington's money was slow in arriving. The Texans were
short of homegrown cash and often resorted to dramatic gestures to squeeze some out of the national office.

On the morning of the rally, Branch called Washington and said, “If your advance guy doesn't have your half when I get there, you might as well not send Shriver.” Branch in fact had the necessary funds in his trunk. Steve Robbins and Tony Podesta, who had opposed the idea in the first place, exploded at the threat. “We're gonna have your ass, Taylor, you fucking incompetent! We're gonna get you fired for this!”

“You couldn't fire me,” Branch screamed back. “You couldn't find anybody else to agree to take this goddamn job!”

Washington came up with the money.

On the night of September 22, Clinton watched Sargent Shriver, the patrician Democratic nominee for vice president, his coat off and shirt-sleeves rolled up, mingle with fifteen hundred people, die-hard McGovern-Shriver supporters and hungry locals in search of a meal, who had assembled on the lawn of the Wilson County Courthouse at a people's party where the food and drinks were free: ten thousand tamales, three thousand pounds of beans, four thousand jalapeño peppers, trash cans full of peanuts, and two hundred and forty gallons of beer.

A few
miles away, guests were arriving at John and Nellie Connally's contemporary stone frame and glass ranchhouse. Their long driveway was lined with limousines and a private airstrip hummed with helicopters and private jets. Among the wealthy Democrats for Nixon in attendance were oilmen, manufacturers, and university regents, even Johnson's former Air Force One pilot, sporting a—Nixon Now—button. Chrysanthemums floated in Big John's pool. On the front lawn, under an orange and yellow awning, outdoor tables shone with crystal and silver settings. President Nixon and his wife and four hundred guests dined on roast beef and black-eyed peas.

For every Texas Democrat who publicly followed Connally into the Nixon camp, there were more who remained silent. Ten members of the state Democratic executive committee refused to sign a petition endorsing the top of the ticket. In San Antonio, officials at Democratic party headquarters would not talk to local McGovern campaign officials. Clinton spent much of his time on the telephone sweet-talking reluctant party regulars or going out on the road to see them in person. He studied the politics of each county, paying careful attention to the various factions. “
When he
arrived there was a feeling that Texas was such a vast state that no outsider could possibly learn who was enemies of whom, but after a while, mention a name or an event and Bill knew more about it than you did,” Bebe Champ said later. “If you went to this town you had to see so-and-so. He was so easy to talk to, people would tell him stuff, and he remembered it. He was so likable, people tried to help him not stub his toe.”

Clinton got away from the Austin office whenever possible, often heading
south to the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio, where he fell in love with Tex-Mex food and became addicted to the mango ice cream at Menger's Hotel, or east to Houston, where he studied political organizing at the side of Billie Carr. Carr wore a “Liberal and Proud of It” button and distributed “
Billie Carr—Bitch”
namecards. She first took sides when her parents brought her to the 1928 Democratic Convention and pinned an Al Smith button on her diaper. From the day in 1952 when Governor Allan Shivers boasted to her, “Young lady, I have this state in the palm of my hand,” Carr had looked upon conservative Democrats as her mortal enemies and fought them at every opportunity. She had loyal followers, but even among fellow liberals she had her share of enemies. Her detractors complained that she was not a team player. Some people in the McGovern campaign complained that she had the best mailing list of liberal activists in the state but was reluctant to share it. Anne McAfee, one of Carr's liberal antagonists in Austin, accused her of using the list to wield power. The reason Clinton had to visit Houston so often, McAfee charged, was that he was “courting Billie to try to get the list.” That might have been part of it. Clinton's dealings were usually played out on two or three levels at once. Another reason could have been that he and Carr enjoyed each other's company. Carr, a rugged, heavyset woman eighteen years older than Clinton, reminded him of some of the independent women of Hope and Hot Springs, including his mother. She loved politics as a way to meet people, and it was that interaction as much as ideology that drove her—a lot like Clinton.

“
Bill liked
going out and shaking hands. He liked the meetings before meetings and the meetings after meetings. He liked to eat and drink,” Carr recalled. They would drive around in Carr's yellow Chevrolet to organizational gatherings of only ten or twelve people, sometimes only the host and a close friend or two. It was retail politics at its extreme. On many nights as they drove back from a meeting, Clinton would tell her the life stories of everyone who had been in the room. “I swear he would get everybody's life story before he left. You couldn't get him away from talking to people and listening to them even then.” At larger party functions Clinton would often be approached by Carr's enemies, who said it was unwise to place her in a visible position. “Well, I understand you have problems with Billie,” Clinton said at one such confrontation. “But Billie is working hard for us. We need you, too. What can you do for us?” Clinton never demoted her or tried to hide her.

One day while they were eating lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Houston, Clinton told Carr about his future plans. “I'
m gonna
tell you something and you're gonna laugh,” Clinton said as he devoured a plate of enchiladas. “As soon as I get out of school, I'm movin' back to Arkansas. I love Arkansas.
I'm goin' back there to live. I'm gonna run for office there. And someday I'm gonna be governor. And then one day I'll be callin' ya, Billie, and tellin' ya I'm runnin' for president and I need your help.”