First In His Class (56 page)

T
HE
University of Arkansas School of Law had never before encountered a faculty member quite like Clinton. With his boyish face and long curly hair, he looked like one of the students and he often acted like one as well. He was a student's law professor rather than a law professor's law professor. In part, his style reflected the contrasting philosophies of the school where he learned the law and the school where he was now teaching it. At Yale, the hard part was getting admitted: once you got in, you were part of an elite club, and
it was
virtually impossible to flunk out. Arkansas, the only law school in the state, was obliged to open its doors to a majority of applicants, four-fifths of whom came from within the state. The easy part was getting in. It was not unusual for 30 percent of the first-year students to receive failing grades. Several professors took pleasure in terrorizing first-year students. Clinton was the opposite.

Although Clinton wanted to teach the glamorous subjects, criminal law and constitutional law, he told the dean that he would be willing to take on whatever courses needed to be taught. In the fall of his first year that left him with agency and partnership, which he knew little about at the start, and trade regulation, an antitrust course that he had studied at Yale. He searched for ways to relate the material to the more lively world of politics. In the agency and partnership class, for instance, he often brought the class conversation around to Watergate. “
We had
long discussions
about whether the people involved in Watergate were agents of the president,” recalled Moril Harriman, a student in Clinton's first class.

It was difficult to distinguish Clinton's class period from the rest of his day. Before class he could usually be found at the student lounge eating breakfast and “
shooting the
breeze—about anything,” according to another former student, Woody Bassett. If a subject caught his interest in the lounge and it had the vaguest relationship to the law, he might continue the discussion once class started. Clinton worked the aisle during class discussions and displayed an early variation of the town meeting or talk-show-host style he would later use with great effectiveness. Other Arkansas law professors tended to be more deliberate and sharp in their use of the Socratic method. They came in with notes and a set of concepts they wanted to cover. They asked pointed questions and called on students at random. Clinton often spoke without written notes and lectured in a conversational tone. Students were free to enter the discussion when they had something to say. In the end, this pressure-free approach led to lively discussions in which the whole class participated. “
There was
some grumbling by faculty members about the grades in Bill's courses,” according to law professor Rafael Guzman. “There were always an abundance of A's and B's, D's were extremely rare, and I doubt very much that Bill ever gave an F. The inside joke was, ‘Bill doesn't give D's and F's because he might someday need those votes.ߣ” As the law school dean, Davis took note of Clinton's grading pattern and considered it “on the high side,” but “not enough to take him to lunch about it—he just didn't want to give anybody anything below a C.”

As word spread that he was an interesting teacher who gave high grades, his courses became increasingly popular. Even his admiralty class on maritime law, a subject of limited interest to most lawyers in Arkansas, bulged with seventy students. But Clinton's casualness sometimes drove even his students to distraction. He was slow in marking exams and posting final grades. One running story at the law school during Clinton's time there was about two law students catching sight of each other across a golf course fairway in late spring and one yelling across to the other, “Hey, I finally got my grade in Clinton's class”—pause—“from the fall semester!”
Once he
accidentally left the final exam blue books in his car and they disappeared. It was never clear whether he lost them or they were stolen, though Davis found it “mind-boggling that they could have been stolen.” His students were given the option of retaking the exam or getting credit for the course without a grade—an unsatisfactory prospect for most of them since they were counting on Clinton's generosity to raise their grade point averages. Another semester on the morning of exam day, colleagues chortled knowingly at the sight of Clinton in a frenzy because he had
waited until the last minute to prepare the exam. Students were answering the first question while Clinton was still writing the next. Clinton always seemed to be juggling too many things at the same time.

Mort Gitelman, as a senior faculty member, was asked to observe Clinton's classroom performance one semester to prepare a report for the tenure committee. Clinton was teaching constitutional law, Gitelman's specialty. His report “wasn'
t terribly
kind to Bill,” Gitelman recalled. “He was very good at engaging the students
in the
classroom, but a lot of times he was kind of off-the-cuff. I wouldn't say unprepared, but not terribly organized. He was not the kind of person who would prepare a class meticulously.” On the positive side, Gitelman noted that Clinton possessed “qualities that went into the making of a good teacher. He wouldn't try to impose his views on people. He would draw people out.” Had Clinton stayed in legal education, by Gitelman's account, “he would have been okay.”

In the constitutional law class, Clinton devoted two weeks to a discussion of the seminal
Roe
v.
Wade
decision legalizing abortion. According to Woody Bassett, Clinton told the class that he believed
Roe
was “the most difficult of all court decisions” during that era, and that he thought “they made the right decision.” The legal aspect of the case that he emphasized in class was how the Supreme Court devised a way to define a right of privacy not defined in the Constitution. He also spent time dealing with other women's rights issues related to abortion. When one state legislator proposed a measure criminalizing abortion, suggesting that women who had abortions should be prosecuted for murder, Clinton asked the class to consider the possibilities. “What would you do if a woman was sleeping and rolled over and accidentally killed her unborn child—would that be manslaughter?” he asked. “It was an intense discussion about how far it would go,” recalled Jesse Kearney, a student in the class. “Bill was good at posing the questions.”

Clinton reached Fayetteville at a crucial time for black students at the law school. They were
part of
the first wave of African Americans, ten to fifteen students per class. Many of them were on probation, on the verge of flunking out, and looking for a mentor on the all-white faculty. L T. Simes, who came out of the Mississippi Delta town of West Helena, Arkansas, and Ouachita Baptist University, arrived at the law school in 1972, one year ahead of Clinton. “The first year we were there was the most difficult of my life,” Simes said later. “Black students in law school were not faring too well as a whole. It was sink or swim.” Among other concerns, many black students thought they were not being graded fairly.

Along came Clinton, who to the blacks seemed different from the rest of the faculty. He quickly became their friend and champion. He was young
and outspoken in renouncing racism and the black students naturally gravitated to him. In the classroom, his relaxed style was a special comfort to the blacks. Outside the classroom, he became a tutor for many of the black students, holding sessions at his house or at the law school lounge. “He always had people around him, he was always holding court,” Carol Willis, a student from McGehee, another poor Delta town, recalled. “Most black lawyers my age just about owe Bill Clinton for getting them out of law school. He would take the time to make sure you understood the material.” Although his classroom style and tutoring helped the black students stay in school, so too did the grades he would give them. They could get a B in his class and a D in another and stay off academic probation.

The black law students eventually gave Clinton a nickname. They called him “Wonder Boy.” “In the South at that time, whites would say one thing, but their deeds and words were often different,” Simes said later. “So here comes a person where no matter what your relationship with him was, he was not prejudiced. He did not let race treat you different from anyone else. That's why we called him Wonder Boy. It was a miracle the way he was. He could have shunned black students politically. Fayetteville and northwest Arkansas was a white enclave. Wonder Boy Bill did not waver in respect to his conduct with African Americans.”

Y
EARS
later,
perpetuating the
myth that his life progressed in a series of accidents and uncalculated events, Clinton would insist that he embarked on his first political candidacy in Fayetteville reluctantly and only after he had failed to persuade several other people to make the race. In fact, he seemed eager, hungry—anything but reluctant. And he was especially eager for a political office that, if he won it, would take him away from Arkansas. He told Rudy Moore in the fall of 1973 that he wanted to run for office but believed that a seat in the state legislature would not satisfy him: “
He felt
he had to go bigger. He had his eye on a higher prize.” At age twenty-seven—twenty-eight by the time of the next round of fall elections—there would be nothing extraordinary about Clinton serving in the state legislature. In the realm of state politics, then, he was too old to be called a boy wonder. Steve Smith, after all, had been elected when he was only twenty-one, and Mack McLarty, Clinton's childhood friend from Hope, went up to the state capitol as a representative when he was twenty-five.

The careers of Clinton and McLarty were rolling in different directions. McLarty, even more than his ambitious kindergarten mate, carried great expectations with him during his early life. People said that he was destined to be governor. They said it about him when he was the sixteen-year-old governor of Arkansas Boys State, when he was the star quarterback
of Hope High, when he was the popular student body president at the University of Arkansas, and when he was elected to the legislature in 1971 as the presumed leader of an activist freshman class. Yet by the time Clinton returned to Arkansas ready to dive into electoral politics, McLarty had already climbed out of the pool. He served a single two-year term in the Arkansas House and then quit. He already had a wife and child when he entered the legislature, and there was pressure on him to go back to Hope and take control of the family's lucrative auto business, which he seemed far more eager to do than run for reelection. He yearned for stability, he was more comfortable in the business world and was troubled by the uncertainties of elective politics. Helping out behind the scenes, as a party chairman or fundraiser, was more to his liking than being the center of attention, the target of opposition. It was hard for anyone to imagine McLarty losing an election in Hope, or in all of Arkansas—but he imagined it. “
What if
you don't win?” he asked himself. Politics, he would later confess, always seemed like “a high-stakes gamble.” During his one term in the House, McLarty was uncomforable and barely noticed.

Clinton was comfortable with everything about politics except the notion of being a small fish in a small pond. There was one obvious choice for him. As far back as February 1973, when he visited Arkansas from New Haven to take the state bar exam, friends remember him pounding them with questions that indicated he wanted to come home and run for Congress in the Third Congressional District, which included Hot Springs and Fayetteville. Now he was back in the state, and the moment had arrived.
In early
December, he drove to the Little Rock suburb of Sherwood and spent a long night talking with Paul Fray, his friend from the Holt Generation days who had been waiting eight years for the time when Clinton would run for Congress. As Clinton devoured a salty Virginia ham prepared by Mary Lee Fray's mother, he and Paul Fray analyzed the congressional district county by county.

They concluded that Hammerschmidt, the Republican incumbent, had a nearly unbreakable hold on the district's largest city, Fort Smith, because of the many retired military families in that area and Hammerschmidt's ability to satisfy their concerns through the House Veterans Affairs Committee. The key to giving Hammerschmidt a tough race was to concentrate on the other twenty counties, especially the rural ones in the hills. They had to go out into the hills, Fray said, “and hammer the hell out of them.”

Not long after the session with Fray, on a bitterly cold evening that winter, Clinton walked over to Carl Whillock's comfortable seven-bed-room house in the shadows of Old Main near the law school in Fayetteville. He had been a regular visitor at the Whillock residence all school year. Whenever he had free time he would drop by to joke around and make
peanut butter and banana sandwiches with the Whillocks' three teenage daughters, and then stay up late talking politics with Carl and his wife Margaret. On this night they were chatting in the parlor room, warming by a fire, when Clinton said, “I'
ve been
thinking about running for Congress. What do you think about it?”

“Wait right here, I'll go get my card file,” Whillock said. He came back with a box that his wife had never seen before, brimming with names and telephone numbers and key contacts all across the Third Congressional District from his days as Trimble's aide. The two men sat in the kitchen late into the night going over the names in Whillock's old file.

Hammerschmidt had not faced a serious challenge from a Democratic opponent since he wrested the seat from Trimble in 1966, the year that Republicans had first gained a foothold in Arkansas with the election of Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. Hammerschmidt had won with two-thirds of the vote in 1968 and 1970 and then a smothering 77 percent in 1972. Over the course of his four terms in office he had become a popular figure among voters and public officials from both parties through solid constituency work and careful nurturing of the private interests in northwest Arkansas. As the only timberman in Congress, he was considered an especially valuable ally of the heavily forested district's significant timber industry. The odds were weighted against anyone seeking to oppose John Paul, as Hammerschmidt was known, even though it was an off-year, when the party out of power usually gained House seats and the Democrats seemed especially ready to do so as President Nixon's popularity declined with every new Watergate revelation.