First In His Class (55 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
 
HOME AGAIN

C
LINTON WENT OUT
into the world as a favorite son, barely eighteen, and now, nine years later, a man of twenty-seven, he was back. He had survived the perilous journey through the sixties and come home with his mission accomplished. He had established his academic credentials at Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale. He had woven his way through the war years undamaged in body if not in soul. He had proved that he could compete with the brightest of his generation, and indeed had constructed a vast network of contemporaries who would stand by him for the rest of his career. He had discovered a wide world of women, including one who might help him get to where he wanted to go and who was, whether he always liked it or not, his match: bright, organized, ambitious, independent, sharp-tongued, unafraid of him and yet tolerant of his foibles. He had learned the ways of Capitol Hill and engaged in the rollicking and dirty business of electoral politics in Connecticut and Texas. He had visited the capitals of Europe and gazed upon Lenin's Tomb and Shelley's mausoleum and searched in the cold Welsh rain for the birthplace of Dylan Thomas. Now he was home in his green, green grassy place, his folk-tale Arkansas, here to begin Act Two: a political life.

The story of his return to Arkansas opens with a stretch, a peculiar exaggeration, a myth—harmless perhaps, but peculiarly Clintonian and revealing. The way Clinton would tell the story for years afterward, his hiring as an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law in the fall of 1973 was “
a pure
accident.” The phrasing is reminiscent of his claim that his avoidance of the draft during the Vietnam War years was “a fluke”—which it most certainly was not, no more than his arrival at the law school in Fayetteville was an accident. In the tale as Clinton would tell it, he was driving home from Connecticut at the end of his Yale days and, acting on a tip from a friendly professor, stopped at a telephone booth along Interstate 40, placed a call to the Arkansas Law School dean, and talked his way into an interview and a job—simple as that, just a spur-of-the-moment bit of roadside serendipity. Wylie H. Davis, the law school dean at the time, would encounter the Clinton version of events years later and find it “
amusingly inaccurate
and somewhat melodramatic.” And he would ask: “Why degrade a Horatio Alger-type story with a self-inflicted nuisance like the facts?”—to which he could only answer himself that he felt compelled by “neurotic lawyers and history buffs” to set the record straight.

Clinton began aggressively pursuing a teaching position at Arkansas several months before he got his law degree at Yale.
He recruited
a political friend from Fayetteville, Steve Smith, to serve as his intermediary. Smith was a liberal young state legislator who had become friendly with Clinton during the McGovern campaign, when he was the only Arkansas delegate at Miami Beach to vote for McGovern on the first ballot. He talked about Clinton to J. Steven Clark, an associate dean at the Arkansas Law School who was also part of the state's political network. In March 1973, during his spring break from Yale, Clinton contacted Dean Wylie Davis, who would later recall that from that point on, “
the entire
process was as deliberate and formalized as it was—and had to be—in every new hire case.” The law school received glowing letters of recommendation for Clinton from several professors at Yale as well as a record of his grades, which Davis and his colleagues paid little attention to because they found the Yale grading system “a slightly arrogant and eccentric neo-British affectation”—a cutting but misdirected insult, since the pass-fail system was the product not of haughty academics but of rebellious students.

Clinton flew to Fayetteville in early May to appear before the Faculty Appointments Committee. David Newbern, who chaired the committee, had
a curious
first impression of the young applicant from Yale. On the morning of Clinton's first day in town, Newbern stopped at the Holiday Inn where Clinton was staying to pick him up and escort him to the law school for a day of interviews. He encountered Clinton in the coffee shop talking to Steve Smith. Newbern wondered how Clinton knew Smith and why he would be engaged in such an intense political conversation on the morning when he was interviewing to become a law teacher. Later, he escorted Clinton from one faculty office to another. Finally, in an exit interview, Newbern asked the question that had been troubling him all day.

“Bill, are you coming to Arkansas to teach with us, are you coming because you want to be a law professor, or is this just a stepping stone?”

“I have no plans at this time to run for public office,” Clinton said.

It was, Newbern thought, the classic political response.

Whatever Clinton's intentions, the Arkansas law faculty was greatly impressed. “
He charmed
us all right out of our mortarboards,” said Dean Davis, who thought that Clinton displayed “a wide range of interests and learning for a young person.” Clinton talked politics incessantly during the
interview, but it did not bother Davis much because “in Arkansas, politics is a hobby for everybody, so it didn't seem out of place.” Newbern, Mort Gitelman, and a few other professors raised questions about Clinton before the faculty voted on him. They were impressed by his Rhodes Scholarship and the rest of his résumé, but wondered whether he would make a good scholar. “
It was
very clear even back then that Clinton's main goal was a political career,” Gitelman recalled. “The faculty debated the appointment on the theory of whether he would make a legal scholar and do the publications.” In the end they were convinced that he would excel as a classroom teacher, and was worth the gamble. The vote was unanimous.
Clinton was
offered the job on May 12 and accepted May 22.

He moved to Fayetteville in midsummer and
rented a
contemporary stone and glass one-bedroom house in the country about ten miles southeast of town along Route 16 on the road to Elkins and a route through the hills known as the Pig Trail. The mimosa-blossomed winding roads, rolling hills, lazy-looped rivers, thick pine forests, and green-gorge vistas of north-west Arkansas were hauntingly beautiful and familiar to him. He considered all of Arkansas his home, and Fayetteville in the Ozarks represented his carefree backyard, the place he had escaped to during the summers of his youth to attend band camp. But it also had another meaning that evoked profoundly different feelings in him. The university and its row of fraternity houses served as the social nexus and training ground of the Arkansas good ole boy establishment. Four years earlier, when he was contemplating attending the University of Arkansas Law School so that he could join the ROTC program there and avert the draft, the notion of returning to Fayetteville made Bill Clinton feel strange. Part of the equation that sent him back to Oxford for a second year instead of choosing the safe haven of the state university was the queasiness he felt about getting stuck in Arkansas, a place which seemed “barren” of global thinkers and intellectual stimulation, as he had written in a letter to Rick Stearns.

So his relocation in Fayetteville was not an entirely simple homecoming. His relationship with his state was shaped by a triangular internal contradiction that would stay with him from then on and is crucial to understanding Clinton's political evolution. At one point of the triangle was myth: the way he would romanticize the Arkansas of huge watermelons and simple country folk, especially when he was away from it. At a second point of the triangle was pragmatism: the realization that Arkansas was the easiest base, the only base, for his political rise. At the third point of the triangle was ambition: a powerful desire to move beyond his provincial roots. Clinton would make it seem that he came home to Arkansas and stayed there for two decades out of pure love and obligation—but events would soon prove otherwise.

On August
23, not long after he had settled, he appeared at a watermelon
party of the Washington County Democratic Central Committee in the sprawling two-acre backyard behind the grand old house of Ann and Morriss Henry along Highway 45. The party regulars at the Henry house were local figures of the sort that any aspiring politician would need to know, hardcore committed Democratic loyalists who performed the drudge work of organization and were the primary sources of inside political gossip. Clinton swept through the crowd as though he were an honored guest. “He came in … he wasn't invited but somebody brought him … he had just got to town, he shook hands, he talked, and by the time he left he knew every single person there,” Ann Henry recalled later. “It was a perfect way for him to leave an impression.”

Clinton was eager to make an impression and quickly took on several projects outside the law school.
He filed
an amicus brief in support of his friend Steve Smith, who was a key figure in a voting-fraud case being heard in rural Madison County. Republicans charged that Smith had interfered in the 1972 election by helping elderly residents fill out their ballots at a nursing home. Smith said that he and two nursing-home employees merely helped distribute the ballots. Clinton, in his friend of the court brief, presented a legal argument placing Smith's assistance within the boundaries of laws relating to ballot delivery. The court eventually disallowed the twenty-five votes that Smith had garnered at the nursing home, not enough to change the election outcome. The case attracted the interest of political reporters in northwest Arkansas. “
Clinton came
up and sat in the jury box with us,” recalled veteran political reporter Brenda Blagg of
The Morning News
in Springdale. “He was part of the crowd.”

His first challenge to the local establishment came in Springdale, a comfortable middle-class community north of Fayetteville, where he formed a friendship with Rudy Moore, Jr., a progressive state legislator whose law firm had business and political connections to Senator Fulbright. Weeks before Clinton arrived, Fulbright had met with Moore and told him that a young man who had been on his staff was moving to the area to teach at the law school, and that he and Moore “ought to know about each other.”
Clinton called
Moore when he got to town and they spent hours talking politics. “Right off the bat,” Moore recalled later, Clinton became absorbed in a local issue involving doctors who were rejecting Medicaid patients. Medicaid was not a popular social program then among Springdale's doctors. Moore agreed to lend the clout of his legislative office to Clinton's informal poll, which found only one or two doctors in town who were willing to accept Medicaid patients. In his first political encounter with the health care issue, Clinton got nowhere. The Springdale doctors “crawled all over” Moore for “sending somebody to look into” their affairs. Moore and Clinton backed away, but not before Clinton had rung up one strike against him among the doctors.

There were no strangers in Fayetteville. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, and often it seemed they were all related and they all had political connections. During the last week in August, Clinton went to lunch at Wyatt's cafeteria with a group of professors and administrators, one of whom happened to be Rudy Moore's brother-in-law, Carl Whillock, a university vice president.
Whillock had
previously served as the administrative assistant to James W. Trimble, the former Democratic congressman from northwest Arkansas who had been defeated in 1966 by Republican John Paul Hammerschmidt. The talk among the group was almost exclusively about Watergate, the scandal that had become a daily television drama starring Chairman Sam Ervin and his colleagues on the Senate Watergate Committee. In the car on the way to lunch, Whillock, a dignified man who dressed conservatively, seemed unusually quiet. Finally, when they were all seated at the cafeteria, someone asked him what he thought of the scandal. “I think Richard Nixon would cause great bodily harm to close family members if it would help him politically,” he said. Clinton was shocked. He had misjudged Whillock because of his appearance and his earlier silence. Now he wanted to know more about him, and the more they talked, the more fascinated Clinton became. If Clinton wanted to get anywhere politically up in these hills, he could not find a steadier guide.